Learn about Sleep metrics

Get a tour of Web app's Sleep tool

Robert Higdon avatar
Written by Robert Higdon
Updated over a week ago

Sleep, a part of the Web app, is where you'll find sleep metrics for the users in your ReadiBand program. Whether you want to get averages for a time range or see sleep metrics for a single user, Sleep is where sleep metrics live.

Here, we'll tour the sleep metrics and show you how to use Sleep.

Key influencers of fatigue: quantity, quality, & consistency

The key influencers of fatigue come down to:

  1. how much one sleeps (quantity), 

  2. the quality of the sleep, and 

  3. the consistency of when one sleeps. 

Each metric relating to these key influencers has a range that’s considered normal (green), fair (orange), or poor (red). 

Because Sleep has so much data to view, some metrics are hidden from the table by default. We'll talk about the table filter at the end of this article.

Let's go over the most important metrics and what they tell you about a user's sleep.

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1 - Quantity

Sleep quantity is the most straightforward influencer of fatigue. Most adults require 7-9 hours of sleep daily to function optimally.
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2 - Quality

Sleep quality is the most complicated influencer of fatigue. There are many metrics that could suggest someone’s sleep quality, but several of them can only be measured with in-lab sleep testing (Polysomnography). 

In Sleep, you'll be able to see a score out of 10 for Sleep Quality

Metrics like Wake after sleep onset, Awakenings, and Sleep latency are taken into account when calculating the Sleep Quality score, but viewing them independently may give you even deeper insight into a user's sleep quality.   

Wake after sleep onset helps you understand how fragmented someone's sleep is. It's the total number of awake minutes between the sleep onset and wake time.  

Awakenings are any period of more than 5 continuous minutes where the movement of your wrist suggests you may be awake. 

Generally speaking, continuous sleep with few awakenings is more efficient, and therefore more restorative. 

On the other hand, a high number of awakenings suggests that sleep is broken up and less restorative, and so more total sleep will be necessary to have the same health and alertness benefits than less fragmented sleep. 

For example, 7 hours of sleep with 2 awakenings will boost your ReadiScore more than 7 hours of sleep with 6 awakenings.

Sleep also shows you Awakenings per hour. This is a better relative measure of the fragmentation of your sleep over time compared to total awakenings. For example, 4 awakenings over 8 hours of sleep (0.5/hr) is very different than 4 awakenings over 4 hours of sleep (1/hr).

Sleep latency is the average amount of time it takes for someone to transition from wakefulness to sleep. Take this metric with a grain of salt. It can be inflated on occasions where someone is motionless reading a book or watching a movie. This metric is helpful if assessed conjunction with other metrics. 


(Hidden by default) Sleep Efficiency is another quality metric that takes awakenings, and the time lost to them, into account and displays a percentage. It's another simplified quality indicator, but one that's also displayed in Readi.   


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3 - Consistency

Going to bed and waking up at the same time every day makes everything to do with sleep easier. Inconsistent sleepers will find it more difficult to fall asleep and wake, and to regularly obtain a sufficient amount of sleep. 

This is due to the 24-hour internal body clock (the circadian rhythm) which cycles between sleepiness and alertness at regular intervals. 

When we deviate daily from the natural signals of our body clock, our natural biology slips out of alignment. This misalignment is most obvious when we're jet lagged, although it occurs with general inconsistency with sleep (e.g. the "social jet lag" of the weekend nights).

Metrics like Sleep onset, and Wake time help us see the consistency of sleep. 

Sleep onset is the time of transition from wakefulness to sleep for the major sleep period or the moment one falls asleep, and Wake time marks the end of the major sleep period or when one wakes up. 

(Hidden by default) Onset variance and Wake variance are two other metrics that indicate consistency. The greater the difference between the user's bed times, the greater the Onset variance will be. Wake variance is calculated from the wake times.

Alternatively, you can determine consistency visually by clicking a particular user's name, then the Detail tab. Ask yourself, do their recorded sleeps (grey blocks) seem to start and end around the same time?

  

How to use Sleep

View different date ranges
Use the date picker to see sleep data from the last 7, 14, 30 days, last month, or choose a custom range. 


Create and filter by groups
Want to see sleep data from one shift and not the other? Use groups to filter your users.

View the average ReadiScore or average sleep quantity for all users in a location
Use the drop down to change between the two graphs.

Find out what makes a metric normal (green), fair (orange), or poor (red)
Hover over the name of any sleep metric to see the definition and the normal/fair/poor thresholds. 

See whether a user's ReadiScore is improving (or not)
Trend tells you whether a user's ReadiScore is going up (+), down (-), or staying the same (0). Check out this article to learn more about how Trend is calculated.


See only the metrics you want using the table filter
Show to hide sleep metrics with the table filter. Remember to scroll to the right to view all the metrics.

Look at just one user's sleep metrics in depth
You can view all the same sleep metrics and a graph for average ReadiScores or sleep quantity just for one user. By clicking the Detail tab, you can see some key metrics (ReadiScore, sleep onset, and wake time) visually represented in graphs (one for every day).

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