If you want to improve your lifestyle, then you need a smartwatch.
While so many aspects of our lives are measured, often our sleep is something that’s measured the least, despite it being one of the most important aspects of staying healthy.
Smartwatches today are incredible, they don’t look like science experiments, they look like regular stylish watches, but they’re also packing an amazing amount of technology to measure a number of attributes about you.
Thankfully, all these sensors are housed inside a lightweight body that can even be worn to bed. After wearing Huawei’s Watch GT 2e this week, I barely noticed it was there at all, and weighing in at only 43g this is not surprising.
Featured sensors in Huawei’s Watch GT 2e include an Accelerometer, Gyroscope sensor, Geomagnetic sensor, Optical heart rate sensor, Ambient light sensor, Air pressure sensor and Capacitive sensor.
What frustrated me with smartwatches from a few years ago was their relatively short battery life. In 2020, the improvements in battery technology, combined with efficiencies on the software side, means that smartwatches, like the Watch GT 2e, can last up to two weeks on a single charge.
Having substantial battery life like this, is important for the smartwatch to also act as a meaningful sleep tracker. Other devices that need an overnight charge every few days, place critical gaps in your sleep dataset which enables you to determine trends and ultimately behaviour changes that will deliver you a better-quality sleep.
To start tracking your sleep, you simply go to bed, and the Watch GT 2e automatically understands what sleep movements look like and begins monitoring your movements throughout the night.
This sleep data is then seamlessly available in the Huawei Health App on your smartphone, where Huawei’s TruSleep can determine the length of time you spent in each sleep cycle to provide comprehensive data on sleep quality.
TruSleep does this by analysing normal sinus rhythms and breathing signals from the heart rate data, captured by the Watch GT 2e. The Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) method is then used to analyse the coherence and cross-spectral density of the two signals to allow Cardiopulmonary Coupling (CPC) analysis, which can accurately determine which stage of sleep you are in, such as deep sleep, shallow sleep, REM sleep, or wakefulness.
Sleeping is often more than just what happens between 10pm and 7am, so the Watch GT 2e can also detail when you take naps and shares this data with the Huawei Health App. This allows TruSleep to help you draw correlations between a poor night’s sleep and days when you fell asleep on the couch at lunchtime.
Once you have enough data, TruSleep will provide you with a sleep score and share personalised suggestions to help improve your sleep quality.
Another important aspect in understanding your sleep experiences is when and how much you’re exercising. As you focus on accomplishing your health goals, you’ll likely start working out more, burning more energy than you did while locked up in isolation. Pretty soon you’ll be eating more, exercising more and sleeping more as the amazing machine, called your body, fires into action.
Poor sleep quality can be a result of many environmental factors like temperature, noise and lighting, but it can also be caused by that coffee you had an hour before bed. An active mind, like stress at work, can also be a contributing factor, as are drinking alcohol and smoking.
Whatever the case, using a smartwatch, like the Watch GT 2e, to track and measure your current experience helps provides a comparative baseline, as you start to make changes to your lifestyle to improve your sleep and your overall health.
If you don’t get enough deep sleep to allow your body and your brain to recover, you’ll likely be waking up tired and that can not only impact your motivation, but also your relationships.
We reached out to see what some Watch GT 2e owners thought of the sleep features. Elissa from Kogarah, NSW, said,
“I love the sleep model with its comprehensive analysis that tells me how long I had light or deep sleep, and gives me a weekly report. I work in mental health and I understand how essential good sleep is to us. I adjust my sleep pattern accordingly from the report. And I am surprised that I am not really a ‘deep sleeper’ . So, I’m adding some pre-sleep therapy to help boost my health being.”
The benefit of good sleep really can’t be understated. When it comes to maintaining a strong immune system, sleep can be one of the best tools we have and something that’s incredibly important now more than ever.
The HUAWEI Watch GT 2e is available in 46mm and 42mm versions. Powered by Huawei’s Kirin A1 chip, the new collection supports Bluetooth calling (46mm version), up to two weeks of battery life (46mm version), enhanced sport and health management features including 100 workout modes.
To help you start tracking your sleep and inspire an active lifestyle, Huawei is celebrating the EOFY by offering up to 25% off the HUAWEI Watch GT 2e, just make sure you buy now, before the deal ends on June 30.
