What is your sleeping animal? Fitbit’s New Premium Feature Helps You Grow

Fitbit today announced a suite of new sleep assessment features for premium users. The Sleep Profile, launched today through the Fitbit app, is the latest subscription-only data that Fitbit Premium members can use to better understand their unique sleep patterns and identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Using sleep data from approximately 60,000 Fitbit users in a month, the company studied 1,000 different unique attributes of sleep, eventually narrowing it down and compiling it into 10 metrics. Five of them already existed in the Fitbit app, including stages and sleep duration. But five new categories measure the consistency of sleep time, number of days of naps, time to deep sleep, disrupted sleep, and “stability,”which averages the number of short, usually unnoticeable awakenings during the night. With these scores, users can see daily, weekly and monthly trends in each category and see where they are (and should be) in the data range of other users of the same age and gender.

Each month, users will also be assigned sleep chronotypes based on their data. Each of the six types is named after an animal with a similar sleep pattern: giraffe, bear, dolphin, hedgehog, parrot and turtle. According to Fitbit, in addition to being entertaining, the purpose of using them is to help people remember better and reflect how their behavior patterns change over time. Animal-based sleep patterns are not a new concept for sleep science or even wearables; Samsung introduced a similar feature with the Galaxy Watch 4 this year.

Sleep Profile requires users to wear a compatible Fitbit device (Sense, Versa 2 or 3, Charge 5, Luxe, Inspire 2) for at least 14 days in a calendar month to receive ratings. As mentioned, this feature is only available to Fitbit Premium subscribers, who pay $10 a month to access data like this, as well as a moderate library of fitness and mindfulness content, among other paid perks.