Wearable sleep trackers - recommendations?
Is there a good smartwatch/simile that monitors sleep and has excellent battery life (measured in weeks not hours)?
I use the Withings (ex-Nokia) Steel HR, but it … kinda sucks. The bluetooth pairings very often lose sleep data, it's very inaccurate, the reporting sucks for non-24s, and the leather bracelet is of very poor quality, keeps breaking.
I really don't care for the fitness/step tracking which, as someone else here put it, thinks typing on a keyboard or eating is a step.
I also briefly tried an Oura (https://ouraring.com/), but I never got it to work and had to send it back.
I also don't care much for any of those "sleep quality" trackers that try to detect if I snore and what not. I can do sleep studies in my own time, I just want to have accurate stats on whether and when I am asleep.
An oldie but a goodie: a pebble works well enough for sleep as android's smart alarm clock. It will track sleep cycles, but nothing fancy like heart rate or breathing. If you can find a pebble time steel, the battery life is around a week and a half. You can get a few days charge in minutes and a full charge in less than an hour.
You should also try sleep as android's sonar. It makes inaudible pings and listens to them. It works surprisingly well in my experience. Your phone can be on a nightstand changing near your bed.
For the sake of completeness, I should also mention my sleep phaser. It is what I use for sleep tracking most of the time. It is a nightstand light made by the sleep as android team. It has sleep tracking built in (I think visual/ir). It connects through Bluetooth, and also can simulate a sunrise alarm. I was a backer, so I have version 1. It looks like they may have fixed all my issues with version 2, but I can't say for sure. When mine works, it's fine. I keep using it mostly for the simulated sunrise alarm.
I did do that a couple of years ago, it destroyed my Nexus 6P's battery. :/
Yeah... You can just leave it plugged in.
I've had a Misfit Vapor X (discussion here) for a few months, and it works great with Sleep As Android. It's a very reliable Wear OS device - I've never had Bluetooth/wireless issues, and the inbuilt sensors seem relatively accurate. There are frequent sales at 20 - 30% off the $279 list price.
To answer your concerns, the battery life could be better at approx. 18 - 24 hours/charge depending on how intensively I've used it for fitness tracking during the day. However, Misfit is engaging in active support and they've just released an update to improve this. Battery life is an issue with nearly all Android Wear OS devices, but there are far more options and tools in that ecosystem than with more proprietary OS's.
I was having major insomnia due to some chronic pain problems, and managed to use my Sleep As Android data to find the most effective, safest doses and timing of medications for getting a fair night's sleep.
Anything in the Garmin Vivo line up. My Vivosmart is going on 5 years old, and still runs well. Battery life isn't what it used to be, as now I can only go on two runs with it before charging.
I use a Xiaomi Mi Band 3, which tracks sleep and heart rate (and the fitness stuff as well). The battery life is really nice and it's pretty cheap too. If you want to use it without Xiaomi's proprietary software, you can use Gadgetbridge, which is open source. I'm pretty sure there's a Mi Band 4 out by now, although I'm not sure if you can add it to Gadgetbridge easily (you might need root).
Ouraring :)