Counting sleep: seven nights in bed with the Basis band

Dreams of data analysis

Basis is able to do this by monitoring your skin temperature, perspiration, and blood flow in addition to your movement. The band is smart enough to know when you’re wearing it and when you’ve left it on your dresser, and it won’t mistakenly count idle time as sleep. Unlike other fitness trackers, which primarily use accelerometers to measure your movement, the extra data that the Basis band collects can be analyzed to automatically discover a variety of situations. It can tell not only the point you drifted off and woke up, but how many times you turned over in the night, how often — if at all — you got out of bed, and how long you were in light, deep, and REM sleep throughout the night. The app then takes all this data, crunches it, and spits out a score for how well you’ve slept each night. Naturally, the higher the score, the better you’ve slept and in theory, the more beneficial it was to your body’s overall health.

The Basis apps are equally attractive and informative

Basis offers apps for iOS and Android, and they are equally attractive and informative, distilling your progress and achievements ("Habits" in Basis-speak) into four different tabs. The sleep tracking is given its own tab within the app, where you can see all of your stats and your sleep score. The Android app offers automatic syncing with the band, while the iOS app will only sync on command. Sleep-related Habits include going to bed at the same time each night or waking up at the same time each morning, both of which are said to contribute to better rest overnight.

I consume a lot of caffeine during the day and still feel perpetually tired, so I was sure that the Basis would tell me I’m not getting the quality sleep I should be even though I’m pretty responsible about going to bed before midnight. As it turns out, the Basis told me the exact opposite. According to the band, I averaged 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night and frequently had a sleep score well into the 90s on a 100 point scale (my lowest score was 76, which is still ranked as "Great" by Basis’ metrics). I tossed and turned about two dozen times each night, and the only times that Basis said my sleep was truly interrupted was when the alarm clock went off and I fumbled around for the snooze button.

But if I’m getting plenty of good, restful sleep each night, why do I feel so tired during the day? Unfortunately, that’s a question that the Basis band can’t answer, despite all of its sensors and data crunching. The Basis can tell me how I slept each night, but it can’t tell me how to improve my sleep if my score is low, nor can it tell me why I feel tired when my score is high. It also can’t tell me that it was probably the burrito supreme dinner from Taco Bell that kept me tossing and turning, or that my toddler’s crying at 2AM was what woke me up. I can infer those types of things based on my knowledge of my activities and environment, but I don’t need a $200 gadget strapped to my wrist to tell me that.

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