xda-developers: Your Fitbit may soon tell you if you snore too loudly

Monday, May 31, 2021

Your Fitbit may soon tell you if you snore too loudly

The Fitbit app, the companion app that shows data collected from your Fitbit tracker or smartwatch, will soon gain two new features to provide new insights into your sleeping habits.

In the latest version of the Fitbit app for Android, 9to5Google found evidence for some new sleep-related features that Fitbit is working on. The first is the Snore & Noise Detect feature, which will use the on-device microphone of your Fitbit device to analyze snores and noise levels during sleep. Once you have fallen asleep, Fitbit will turn on the microphone on your device and start listening for snores and other noises. Rather than continuously recording through the night, Fitbit will collect recording samples every few seconds.

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How does Snore & Noise Detect work?

During sleep, the microphone on your Fitbit device can monitor noise, including snores from you or someone next to you. Throughout the night, we look for:

• Sound intensity: We analyze noise level (how loud or quiet it is) to determine the baseline noise level.
• Snoring events: We look for snore-specific noises. When our algorithm detects an event that’s louder than the baseline noise level, it performs a calculation to decide if it’s snoring or something else. If the noise level in your room is louder than the snoring, this feature may not be able to pick up the snoring.

The Fitbit app will then show how much time you spent snoring during your sleep. None to mild indicates you snored for less than 10% of your total sleep, while “Frequent” means you were snoring more than 40% of the time you were asleep.

Fitbit will also be able to analyze the overall noise level in your bedroom, including snoring and other ambient noise. Since the feature will likely draw significant power, Fitbit recommends charging your tracker or smartwatch to at least 40% before going to bed. The “Snore & Noise Detect” feature hasn’t started rolling out widely yet.

The second feature that Fitbit is working on is “Your sleep animal.” The feature is still very much a work in progress at this stage, but it contains various profiles such Restless Sleeper, Segmented Sleeper, Shallow Sleeper, Short, Sleeper, Slow to Fall Asleep Sleeper, Solid Slpeeer, The Bear, The Dolphin, The Giraffe, The Hummingbird, The Kangaroo, and The Tortoise.