Several years ago, I posted about a smart watch that I received for free from my health fund by virtue of walking a lot and accumulating points in their application. I had seen that my daughter has some form of smart watch (not from the health fund) and this planted a seed in my mind that maybe it was time again to try with a smart watch. Maybe they've got smarter over the past five years.
The watch required 69,900 points (and an extra 60 NIS) for purchase (a site selling this watch in Israel has it at 423 NIS, discounted from 499 NIS); a week in which I achieve my walking goal gives me 1,500 points, and most days I earn an extra 30 points, so a normal week will see my point count increase by about 1,600 points. That means that I've been saving for about 44 weeks or ten months. At the moment my weekly goal is 'only' 58,500 steps a week, or 8,357 steps a day. There are days when I barely make this target and days when I far exceed it. As the purpose of the application is to encourage exercise, the weekly total is supposed to increase, but it's been about the same for the past few weeks. I could easily walk more, but if I do this, then the target will increase and then maybe I won't be able to make the weekly target. So I'm gaming the system at the moment by trying to make the daily target; normally once a week I will walk far more, so then on Saturdays I try to walk as little as possible in order not to increase the target.
The booklet came with a QR code, but when I initially scanned it, an app for an online bank started installing. Reading the fine print a bit closer, it talked about installing 'Smart life', but this turned out to be an app that controls smart devices within the home. Eventually I scanned the QR code again and this time another app called 'Smart life' (or rather, 'Oplayer smart life') from Synergy Innovations started to install. It wasn't clear at first how it would connect to the watch: I could see the bluetooth icon on the watch but when I turned on the phone's bluteooth and started scanning, no watch could be found. Eventually the app connected to the watch and since then everything that appears on the watch also appears on the phone.
What does the watch do? Apart from telling the time (useful at night) and measuring steps, it also measures my pulse and oxygen saturation. Supposedly it also measures something to do with sleep, presumably light and deep sleep. It might also measure a few more things, such as swimming, but that can wait for several months.
How accurately does the watch measure steps and pulse? At the moment of writing, Samsung health says that I have walked 3,532 steps today, whereas the watch says 3,427. My pulse last night as measured by the sphygmomanometer was 80 bpm whereas the watch said 87 bpm. There was a similar gap this morning. Intriguingly, I can see a graph of readings starting at midnight although I can't see what each point represents. At midnight and until I got up at 5:30 am, the pulse was low; it then increased just before 6 am which is when I was walking the dog, then decreased again.
The screenshot from the phone app gives an indication of the pulse ("heart health") without actually showing the values. Similarly with sleep: the app only started measuring at midnight (and yesterday there seems to be no sleep at all) so I 'slept' only 5 hrs 12 minuts (which is approximately correct if it's only from midnight); I think that light sleep was from 00:00 until 00:17 (17 minutes), then again from 01:35 until 02:53 (78 minutes), but after that there aren't enough times given that line up with the start or end of periods. To me, it looks about 50% each.
I have just discovered that if I press on that graph (on the phone), I can get details for a day, a week or a month. So I spent 2 hours and 4 minutes in deep sleep and 3 hours 8 minutes in light sleep. I was in deep sleep for 39% of the time measured, which is considered normal, whereas I was in light sleep for 61% which apparently is high. That's slightly confusing: the deep sleep should be considered low if the light sleep is high. But where's my sleep from 9 pm the evening before?
I can also see that my pulse decreased from 61 bpm to about 50 bpm during the night. Pressing on the pulse segment and requesting 'more data' gives me a reading for about once every half hour, including yesterday evening. Apparently my pulse was at 146 bpm yesterday evening at 20:26; as I was watching television at the time, one can only assume that my pulse increased because I was so digusted at the news. At 20:58 the pulse was back down to 68 bpm and decreased to 51 bpm at 22:34.
This is all very interesting, but not too valuable if the data don't match those measured in other ways (and at the moment, they don't!). On the other hand it can give indications and trends. I hope that the problem with measuring sleep will sort itself out.
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