Get sleep start time from Garmin?

Hi folks!

Does anyone know a way to get the start time of sleep from Garmin? I’m relatively handy, and could rig something up if I had to, if anyone knew of a non-screen scrap-y way of getting at the information.

Beeminder folks–is this something you can get through your connection to Garmin Connect?

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Tagging for @apolyton and @bee

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would be nice if that existed :slight_smile:

thanks for the ping @philip !

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@adamwolf I’ve been trying out https://www.tictrac.com the last couple of days. I’ve connected it to Garmin and it seems to be feeding in sleep data
pinging @bee and @dreev:slight_smile:

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please keep us updated

Technically this is something that we could maybe get from the garmin connect api, but what you are actually getting is questionable. Their sleep api is suboptimal.

It seems that the only records they mark as sleep and return in the api are when you put it into sleep mode, but then they just mark everything as sleep.

They auto-detect sleep in their own app, but this seems to be based heavily on the bedtime/wake time that you set in Connect, and also doesn’t seem to propagate to the api. So in my experience it tends to be any time I sit still for longer than 5 minutes after my “bedtime”, that it starts to mark things as sleep – and I’m often sedentary in the evening, long before I get to bed. But anyway, the autodetected sleep time doesn’t seem to be available via the api.

Finally, the suppress all activity-level data for records marked as sleep – or perhaps they just don’t really have the granularity from their hardware to do a very precise job? Anyway, my experience with the connect api says it’s not so great for sleep tracking.

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Hi there,
My workaround with tracking my Garmin Sleep is

  1. on my Garmin setting, set my regular wake time to 12:00am and my bedtime to 11:45pm. This helps me capture almost 24 hours of the day without having to touch any buttons on my device.
  2. This provides three three sleep results from Garmin “Deep Sleep Hours”, “Light Activity Hours” and “Active Hours”.
  3. I use the Deep Sleep Hours to confirm the minimum hours of sleep for that 24 hour period.
  4. I’ve created a “Deep Sleep Hours” goal to track these hours.

I’d love to auto update the “Deep Sleep Hours” from Garmin but cannot figure that out yet.

I hope this helps.
JJ

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Hi @bee thanks for checking this.
I’ve personally found the automated start-end tracking to be most of the times accurate.
That said,in garmin vivofit and also vivoactive, you can manually set the start of your sleep and also the end.

The issue is exactly what the api gives you back.

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Hi jj,
two questions as i’m thinking of (manually) tracking deep sleep as well

  1. I have yet to figure out adding naps in Garmin connect in addition to regular sleep. Any clues?
  2. Did you have any benefits from the process of tracking deep sleep?

thanks!

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[quote=“apolyton, post:4, topic:983”]
I’ve been trying out https://www.tictrac.com the last couple of days. I’ve connected it to Garmin and it seems to be feeding in sleep data
[/quote] by the way, this seems to be a terrible implementation, the numbers they end up showing are usually wrong for some reason…

Hi apolyton,
With Garmin’s update a few days ago I’ve experimented with some new sleep goals in an attempt to capture my Garmin sleep data. Unfortunately no luck… no changes at all.

  1. Sorry, no clues, I guess my nap times, skip the Garmin input and manually add the data to my Beeminder tracking goal.
  2. I was hoping to get the data on deep sleep to compare with other daily productivity goals. So far I have not consistently tracked the deep sleep data so no benefits available. I hope this latest Garmin update with help.
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I’ve signed up for https://www.tictrac.com thanks to your post and linked with Garmin to see how it goes.

I really like their concept but if the numbers are wrong… maybe they need some input and time to fix… Thanks for the intro to them, a good concept :smile:

Question: If they do get better how are you linking to Beeminder?

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no clue, my current plan is just to manually add the data to beeminder every few days

These days my main fitness app is Training Peaks (www.trainingpeaks.com), it syncs from Garmin and MyFitnessPal and also allows you to enter many metrics manually (from weight to insulin levels to hours of deep sleep). It then has a custom charts area which allows me to play around with the data. i’ve started entering deep sleep data manually and will be looking for correlations before beeminding it.

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If you want to start sllep time on Vivofit, then view the activity tracking widget. Select start sleep. When you wake, hold the action key to exit sleep mode. In case if you forget to put watch into sleep mode, you can enter your sleep and wake times manually into your Garmin Connect account to view your sleep statistics. View Garmin Vivofit Manual for details.

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Thank for you the reply although I don’t have a Vivofit but Vivoactive. There is no manual tracking for sleep on that, it’s fully automated.

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