Most “wished for” Garmin feature is smart wake, add your vote for nap tracking
There is a section on Garmin forums where you can ask for new functionality to be added to the company’s devices. Topping the wish list right now are smart wake alarms. But what about nap tracking?
Garmin doesn’t really have a “traditional” features request page on its forums. The closest thing, for some reason, appears on the Connect IQ Bug reports page. This is where users can post suggestions and if these get enough upvotes they may get picked up by Garmin tech staff for future product development. At least, that’s the idea.
The page is similar to a section on Fitbit’s website. But tech support staff there seem to be much more active when it comes to picking up feature requests and interacting with the user community. So its quite a busy place. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Garmin section.
But a place for this sort of thing exists, and a Redditor has recently posted a request for a smart wake alarm feature. This quickly gained votes and is now topping the list of most wished for features.
Smart wake alarms are nothing new. Garmin devices already have the ability to monitor sleep phases. Smart sleep alarms simply choose an appropriate time to wake you up. This typically works by defining a window of time from your alarm setting, for example 30 minutes before and after you have set your alarm. Then the device then picks a time to wake you up, preferably when you are in a light stage of sleep.
As far as other “wished for” features on the forum, many (but not all) are developer related. In second place is a request for Garmin to add sleep related data to the SDK so apps/widgets can read these statistics. This is followed by a wish to allow shared storage when a developer has multiple apps or a suite of apps.
What about nap tracking?
Many brands have built nap tracking functionality into their wearables. It seems like a no-brainer. But for some reason Garmin devices only have the ability to track one sleep session per day. On top of that, you need to define a window during which you typically sleep. Why this is necessary is a mystery to us. We don’t know of any other brands that require you to do this.
Needless to say – all of this is unsatisfactory. Particularly now that sleep stats play such an important function in the newly added Training Readiness score. For those that like to supplement an overnight sleep session with a long afternoon nap, the Training Readiness metric is consistently underestimating their actual ability to train. Which makes these type stats much less useful.
Not all Garmin watches have the new Training Readiness metric. In fact only the Forerunner 955 has this. But when other watches get the feature, our guess is the dissatisfaction with Garmin’s sleep tracking will grow. Training Readiness is already under testing for the Fenix 7 range and Epix 2 and will likely reach public release in the next month or so.
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We are not sure why it is taking Garmin so long to add nap tracking ability to their watches. It doesn’t need to be anything sophisticated and could just be a simple timer which would register the start and end of your nap. This figure would then be taken into account for recovery stats calculations.
As things stand at the moment, naps may influence your Body Battery score and they will help to reduce your Stress Score. So in a round-about way that may influence the Training Readiness calculations. But we know from experience with the Forerunner 955 that this doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Enough votes and hopefully this suggestion will be picked up by Garmin soon. If you haven’t already, feel free to add your vote on this link.
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