I finally found a smartwatch that gets my sleep right

While smartwatches track more metrics than ever, whether they do this well is another story. I’ve used wearables for years to track different things but gave up on getting accurate sleep results a while ago.

However, my experience with the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 changed that. I finally found a watch that can accurately represent my disrupted sleep.

Why smartwatches struggle to understand my sleep

I’ve tried a variety of smartwatches and fitness trackers over the years, and none of them have ever really gotten my sleep right. I mostly tried Fitbit, Samsung, and HUAWEI watches, but they all had a common issue: overestimating how much I actually slept.

I live with fibromyalgia, which results in chronic pain, but also sleep disturbances. This includes difficulty falling asleep, frequent waking up, and non-restorative sleep. This means that while I may sleep up to 10 hours daily on average, I constantly wake up due to pain. And while I lie in bed for up to 12 hours, a significant chunk of that time is spent awake.

Non-restorative sleep also means that even though I sleep longer than the average person, I don’t wake up feeling refreshed. Those 10 hours keep me functional. Less than that, and my fatigue significantly worsens.

In the past, smartwatches have overestimated how much I sleep and how much of that sleep was restful. As a result, despite companies saying that recommendations are personalized, health apps would constantly push me to sleep less.

My most recent smartwatch, the Huawei Watch GT 4, also had a habit of flagging periods of inactivity as naps. This included physiotherapy and watching TV on the couch. This was also an issue when I reviewed the HUAWEI Watch Fit 3.

I haven’t tried a Fitbit watch in a while, since the devices were pulled from the South African market after Google acquired the company. But I had similar issues with the platform, even as the company professed the personalization of its sleep animals feature. The goal was to always sleep less.

Eventually, I stopped trying to track my sleep at all and only used smartwatches for activity tracking.

The Galaxy Watch 8 does things differently

I was skeptical about trying a Samsung smartwatch for sleep tracking. The last time I tried one of its watches, the tracking was worse than any of the other solutions I had used. However, when I asked Android Authority colleagues about a recommended wearable that I could access in South Africa, they noted that the Galaxy Watch 8 had improved tracking over predecessors.

While the consensus was that the Oura Ring 4 would provide the most insightful metrics, the smart ring isn’t available locally without being part of a specific medical aid and bank program combined. Likewise, Fitbit is no longer available in South Africa. So I decided to try out the Watch 8.

The accuracy of its sleep-tracking results pleasantly surprised me. Over several weeks and different scenarios, the watch could successfully track my sleep onset and how often I woke up.

The watch doesn’t use bedtime mode as a shortcut either. Even when I set this mode just as I get in bed, the watch is able to determine that I stayed awake for much longer. This happened recently when it took more than three hours for me to fall asleep, but I set the phone to bedtime mode within 30 minutes.

When it comes to detecting naps, there are a lot fewer false positives. None of my physiotherapy sessions or periods rotting on the couch watching series were detected as naps. This is particularly impressive when it comes to the times when my cat decides to take a nap on my lap, which means I stay mostly still for a few hours.

The exception is when I have bad migraines. When a migraine is bad enough that I need to stay in bed all day, the watch does occasionally detect some of this time as naps.

Overall, though, it’s consistent in its tracking. It also registers how often I wake up during the night, which is frequently. When I have a particularly bad night, I find that the smartwatch usually tracks this frequent waking accurately.

As a result, it also doesn’t push me to sleep less, which is a welcome change of pace. I feel that I get a better idea of how well (or how little) I actually slept, without this constant pressure to adapt to an eight-hour sleep schedule.

There is still room for improvement

The Galaxy Watch 8 is great for sleep tracking, but I think it needs to improve on other fronts. Battery life is one of the biggest issues, especially if you’re used to HUAWEI smartwatches, which can easily go for more than a week without charging.

Currently, I have to charge the Watch 8 every third day. It takes about an hour to charge up. While this isn’t too long in the grand scheme of things, it’s much more than what I’m used to.

You also can’t use certain features if your phone is not charging or you’re not using a Samsung smartphone. For example, I can’t use snore detection unless my phone is charging the whole night — which is not really something I’m willing to do.

Specific features like ECG monitoring and blood pressure measurements are tied to using Samsung Health Monitor, which is only available on Samsung Galaxy phones. This means that even if the features are available in your region, you will still need a Samsung smartphone to use them. This is a bit of a letdown if you don’t want to go all-in on the Samsung ecosystem.

The measurement I question the most, though, is the energy score that the Samsung Health app provides using your sleep data. It seems to rely heavily on your sleep time average, which doesn’t really make sense.

I felt this disconnect when traveling to an event with limited sleep. I had only slept four hours the night before. I felt absolutely awful. But my energy score was good, because it relied heavily on my average of 10 hours of sleep per night. The next day I slept five hours, which only decreased my energy score slightly because my average remained high.

So despite usually sleeping more in a single night than those two days combined, my energy score only showed a slight decrease. However, I felt so drained that I could barely function. The energy score barely registered as a blip, though.

The smartwatch and app also give conflicting advice at times. One notification will tell me to rest, but then I’ll receive another at 11 pm telling me to push towards my daily goals. I’ve learned to ignore apps when they try to push me too much, but this sort of contradiction does undermine confidence in their recommendations.

There’s a lot to like about Galaxy Watch 8, especially when it comes to activity tracking, sleep tracking, and advanced smartwatch controls. However, some of its features are undermined by device lock-in and a relatively short battery life.

I am interested to see where Samsung’s wearables go next, especially since its solutions are available in most regions and don’t require a subscription. But I would like to see a continued emphasis on the quality of metrics, rather than just increasing the number of metrics measured.

If the brand innovates further and focuses on improving its current tools and hardware, I think its sleep tracking could prove to be both useful and accessible.