Inaccurate sleep data?

[JulianL]

I've only been tracking my sleep for the last couple of weeks. While 15 days of data isn't a very good sample I've noticed that, while I'm actually quite impressed with how accurately the sleep reports seem to match my perceptions overnight, on 3 of those 15 days it has recorded me as being almost continuously asleep between about 19:00 and 23:00 in the evening when on all 3 days I know for sure I was on the sofa the whole time half watching TV, messing around with my iPad, getting up now and then because Apple Watch's stand timer told me to or because I wanted to get something etc. While it has on a couple of days correctly caught a time when I dozed off during the afternoon for 20 or 30 minutes (which is quite impressive) I know for sure that I was fully awake during those evening hours where it has logged me as pretty much constantly asleep.

Does anyone else get false data when they are sitting still for a while e.g. when binge watching something on TV?

For people who have been user sleep tracking for longer than I have might this be an initial problem and the software will learn and get better over time? I somehow doubt this because I can't see any way to tell it that some of the times it thought I was asleep were wrong but maybe there is a way and I haven't found it yet?

 

[jz0309]

I've only been tracking my sleep for the last couple of weeks. While 15 days of data isn't a very good sample I've noticed that, while I'm actually quite impressed with how accurately the sleep reports seem to match my perceptions overnight, on 3 of those 15 days it has recorded me as being almost continuously asleep between about 19:00 and 23:00 in the evening when on all 3 days I know for sure I was on the sofa the whole time half watching TV, messing around with my iPad, getting up now and then because Apple Watch's stand timer told me to or because I wanted to get something etc. While it has on a couple of days correctly caught a time when I dozed off during the afternoon for 20 or 30 minutes (which is quite impressive) I know for sure that I was fully awake during those evening hours where it has logged me as pretty much constantly asleep.

Does anyone else get false data when they are sitting still for a while e.g. when binge watching something on TV?

For people who have been user sleep tracking for longer than I have might this be an initial problem and the software will learn and get better over time? I somehow doubt this because I can't see any way to tell it that some of the times it thought I was asleep were wrong but maybe there is a way and I haven't found it yet?

it seems that watchOS 11 has auto sleep detection, there are posts here with similar experiences like yours.
ive been tracking my sleep manually for years now and continue to do so.
check the sleep app if there’s a setting for auto detection

 

[lpb]

Yes, since WatchOS 11 sleep is registered when I'm in the sofa watching TV and not sleeping. To get correct sleep data I have to delete the sofa "sleep" before I go to bed.

This was not a problem with WatchOS 10.

I would like to turn of nap detection. Very annoying...

 

[ufomism]

They also removed the time in bed metric which was quite useful as you could see how long it took to fall asleep.

 

[JulianL]

Thanks for the feedback. I had another false nap of just over 1.5 hrs appear in my health data yesterday evening. That's a total of 4 major (> 1.5 hour false nap) errors in the 15 days I've been using sleep tracking. For me they are all in the evening between 19:00 and 23:00 when I've been watching TV (one day thinking I had been asleep for pretty much that entire 4 hour period).

I had a look and I couldn't find any setting to turn off nap detection. I'm going to file a bug report with Apple about the false detection of naps and suggest that if a fix isn't immediately obvious/available (which it probably isn't, in fairness I suspect this nap detection stuff is something quite difficult/clever that Apple is trying to do) then at least implement an option to disable automatic nap detection (i.e. only try to monitor sleep during the defined sleep period) so that at least users aren't going to get rubbish data mixed in with their really quite impressive (at least in my limited in my experience so far) overnight sleep tracking data.

 

[blw777]

Interestingly, I have exactly the opposite experience. If I actually lie down to take a nap in the afternoon, my Watch generally does not notice. I'd say that it misses 70% of the time, in fact. I might be a (slightly) more active person than average, but I have NEVER had it "detect" a nap whilst I've actually been awake. Of course, WatchOS11 has only been out for what, a month and a half...