# Get sleep start time from Garmin?

**URL:** <https://forum.beeminder.com/t/get-sleep-start-time-from-garmin/983>\
**Category:** Tech\
**Created:** [July 21, 2015, 5:44pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/get-sleep-start-time-from-garmin/983 "2015-07-21T17:44:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![bee](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/bee/32/41_2.png) [@bee](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/bee)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2015, 9:36pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/get-sleep-start-time-from-garmin/983/6 "2015-08-01T21:36:34Z")

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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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