EMFIT REVIEW QS, Gen 2 HRV ? Sleep ? Monitor, Sleep Tracker [2022 version]

EMFIT Review 2022 - Gen 2 model for Quantified Sleep, QS, QS2 Here's an EMFIT review in a nutshell - EMFIT's Gen 2, sleep tracker is the best and most accurate way for athletes to easily monitor detailed sleep and HRV metrics. If you are looking for a sleep management and sleep tracker then try Eight Sleep which regulates bed temperature based on your sleep stage. The new, improved Gen 2 model of EMFIT offers slight practical improvements over the previous version and still delivers the same, great sleep data albeit now with a subscription payment model. This EMFIT Review starts with a summary and then you can scroll further down for much more detail if you came here for that. Specifically, let's look at the QS EMFIT version for overnight sleep tracking which is intended for athletes and regular consumers who want a deep understanding of their sleep patterns and readiness to train. [wp-review id="70768"] EMFIT have 3 essentially-identical products to provide sleep analysis; one each for athletes, the elderly and children prone to night seizures. EMFIT QS is the variant for athletes and 'regular' people. EMFIT Review - INTRODUCTION I have spent over 10 years looking at my sleep and HRV data from an athletic perspective. I've used QS EMFIT since 2016 and the new version since March 2022. Back in 2016, EMFIT was unique and whilst there is still nothing quite the same, there are different kinds of products that look at HRV, sleep and recovery using different technologies and approaches. HRV is now widely discussed and understood at a high level whereas 10 years ago it was some form of elusive magic that few people either didn't know about or didn't trust. Now that HRV is trusted by every single major wearable tech company, the wider world is getting to grips with new insights and new problems, namely a) understanding fairly complex HRV topics and b) the mechanics & meaning of nightly readings. [gallery columns="2" size="medium" ids="70843,70844"] EMFIT QS Alternatives - How does it compare to the competition? The main competitors are Withings Sleep monitor, Apple Beddit, WHOOP 4, Biostrap EVO, Oura Ring, HRV & Sleep apps (ithlete, HRV4Training, Bioforce HRV, Athlytic) and then a whole host of smartwatches and sports watches that don't have a robust offering for athletes and I include Garmin, Apple, Fitbit and Samsung when I say that. Withings Sleep Monitor - is also an under-mattress sensor but the insights are more basic. There are sometimes data issues if you share a bed. Apple Beddit - is just rubbish and is discontinued in any case. WHOOP 4 - is a wearable strap with a good app. It's also available only as a subscription model but covers activity/strain information as well. The wrist is an inherently inaccurate place to capture heart rate data. Biostrap EVO - is a wearable strap with a well-featured app. The Sleep LAB is available only as an add-on subscription model and the ability to buy extra sensors for different parts of the body makes this a great product for Biohackers. The wrist is an inherently inaccurate place to capture heart rate data. Oura - is a wearable ring and excellent app. Again it's only available as a subscription model. The finger is a great place to measure HR during sleep but is poor at accurately measuring HR & activity throughout the day. Apps - The HRV apps tend to range from good to excellent. However the best typically only assess readiness and recovery based on a single 1-5 minute morning chest strap reading. There is a LOT of scientific awesomeness in that approach however it doesn't get you those sleep insights you wanted. Conversely, the apps that claim to track sleep in detail often look good but are built on VERY shaky foundations. The smartwatches - all tend to produce a plethora of data points, very many of which are highly spurious, confusing or just plain wrong. They are all a pain to wear overnight! EMFIT captures great HRV sleep data with no wearable device and no change to your nightly routine. EMFIT QS Gen 2 - What's New? EMFIT QS Gen 2 offers exactly the same information and usage options as before. Easier first-time setup and the possibility to easily add 4 extra room/house locations The strap that goes underneath your mattress is a more durable plastic The way the cable fastens to the strap seems more secure and durable The electronics pod is slightly bigger containing two new modules Fanstel BT840F and Espressif ESP32 Now uses Bluetooth 5 for setup (still 2.4 GHz WiFi) Unboxing, Installation & Configuration The box contains a user guide, the EMFIT QS device, and a power supply. You need a bed and a home WIFI to use it plus a smartphone to set it up. [gallery size="medium" ids="70847,12559,12558"] Installation aka 'sticking it under the mattress'. The heart sensing strip is approximately a third the width of a double bed. It needs to be situated approximately underneath where your heart normally is in relation to the bed. Placement is not an exact science. If you have a topper above the matters (I do) then EMFIT should still work when placed underneath the mattress but you could equally place it under the topper. If you share a bed with a partner you should be OK. You could experiment with pulling the sensor out partly from underneath the mattress and letting the circular pod dangle at the side of the mattress. The strap bends so that will be fine and this positioning means that the entire strap is further away from your partner. Obviously, if you share your half of the bed with a partner then there will be two hearts to read. You might need to experiment with the positioning in such cases. I was initially concerned about interference from two beating hearts however I just stuck EMFIT under the mattress roughly where I guessed my heart would be and it worked well from the first time onwards. If you are concerned about radio frequencies, the wifi pod can be placed a metre or so away from your sleeping position using the >1m long power cable. Configuration You'll need to read the instructions as the process is a little unusual. I won't try to summarise them here. EMFIT creates its own WiFi network. So you connect your smartphone to EMFIT over Wifi. You then tell EMFIT the name of your normal WiFi network and EMFIT configures itself to be part of that network. Kinda simple. Configuration - The EMFIT QS App There isn't an app. An app isn't needed. However, you might want a shortcut on your smartphone or computer desktop. Simply log into the EMFIT web service to browse your stats and then use the URL to create a shortcut that looks like an app - see the smartphone image to the right. Create a shortcut to this URL: https://qs.emfit.com/#/device/presence How It Works Just like scientists can detect the rumblings of a star in a galaxy far, far away. Then so can the EMFIT detect the beat of your heart or the rhythm of your lungs plus all your tosses & turns from its location under your mattress. It uses an extremely sensitive motion sensor. We don't really need to know exactly how it works. But it does. Quite well, in fact. OK, so you want to know how it works! It's NOT an ECG. EMFIT uses a BCG device - ballistocardiograph. A highly sensitive, foil-based compression sensor. Note: It's not a medical-grade device for diagnosis or monitoring but it uses medical-grade components. How to use EMFIT when - Sleeping Sleep data recording is automatic. Just go to bed like you always have and there is no need to press buttons. You can set a sleep/awake period if you have a regular schedule but I think EMFIT just uses that as a guide rather than a definitive statement of when you were in bed asleep. It seems to capture all my sleep, even the very occasional nap. How to use EMFIT when - Waking Get out of bed like you always have. No need to do special readings. No buttons to press. Just get up and go. The data is automatically streamed up to the net although some of the analyses can take 5-15 minutes to show. Just to be clear: Once linked online to the EMFIT server and stuck under your mattress you don't have to do anything else at all other than sleep and look at the data at a time convenient to you. EMFIT Metrics - An Overview The following are measured/recorded: Heart Beat Respiration Rate Physical Activity - turning, getting out of your bed. Whole-night HRV based on frequent, multiple 3-minute samples The following are derived and everything is stored for many years. Sleep Classification Light Deep - physical recovery REM Sleep - psychological recovery LF/HF Ratio -Whole night autonomic nervous system balance Recovery Indices Recovery Ratio - efficiency of recovery Total Recovery - efficiency of recovery Integrated Recovery Evening RMSSD Waking RMSSD That's a lot of data and some information. Here comes the "So What?" factor. Your RMSSD is 32...so what? The real benefit to athletes comes when we can contextualise the data and know to do something about it. Whilst a higher HRV is generally good what matters is how high or low it is in the context of your HRV history. As well as showing you the absolute readings, EMFIT also shows you how that fits your normal, recent range. And that is where EMFIT QS does well. Nice, clear charts which drill down to the full nightly detail. Before digging into those details let's quickly navigate around the dashboard - which is identical on all platforms. EMFIT - Navigating the dashboard In the top right corner of each screen, the menu allows you to: navigate to the main dashboard (Sleep Periods); view very long terms trends of all data (Trends); see real-time data (Live Monitor); and look at a detailed nightly Timeline. It's mostly the dashboard/Sleep Periods that you will look at. High-level information is displayed in a comprehensive dashboard of all your sleep periods for the last 2 weeks. I've shown my dashboard, below, for the two weeks ending 5th April. You can choose any date to be the final date of the 2-weekly periods that are shown across all the graphs. Perhaps 11 different charts are daunting at first but not so bad once you understand what is presented. [caption id="attachment_70869" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Dashboard View[/caption] To get to the detail of any one aspect of your sleep you can either click an icon on any graph or one of the 6 corresponding buttons visible beneath the date bar at the top. [gallery columns="4" ids="70870,70871,70872,70873"] The remainder of the bar at the top of the dashboard screen allows you to add notes, export data and delete nights of data. EMFIT Review - Viewing the Details of the Dashboard I'll just focus on two of the more newsworthy sets of data, these being nightly HR/HRV and Sleep Stages. HRV RMSSD Data The first of the following images show the three HRV views of rMSSD. The top chart shows going-to-sleep and waking-HRV values. In theory, if your waking HRV is higher then you have recovered but it would depend on what you were doing in the evening. Thus both Wednesday sleeps show a high amount of recovery through the night but that could have come from a small glass of wine which depressed the going to sleep value but whose effect easily wore off during the night. The second and third screens show the same date on mobile and desktop. There's a lot of variation in HRV through the night, perhaps reflecting sleep stages but maybe you could see that if I woke up40 minutes earlier my waking HRV would have been even higher. Which is the correct waking value? That kind of question is what troubles scientists when looking at HRV. You really have to compare like with like to get a meaningful reading. Thus, even if you used a chest strap to take a morning reading you would have to follow the same protocol each morning ie immediately after waking, always whilst sitting and only ever after going to the toilet. All those mini-events, and more, could change the reading. Perhaps that's why WHOOP and Oura use the average of all-night readings? Anyway, the science says that morning readings are OK and the science also says that average nightly readings are OK providing there are enough data points. Clearly, EMFIT has many data points. Note: I'm guessing that EMFIT's integrated recovery represents the net sleep above a recent trend line...the higher the better! [gallery size="medium" ids="71023,71022,71024"] Other data can be shown for example this 'bed exit' event. Maybe I went to the toilet at 08:00 but you can see that the upwards trend of HRV recovery continued beyond that. Sleep Stages You can see that EMFIT always records bed entry and exit events - perfectly so in my case. It's not the same as recording going to sleep and waking...that's harder but EMFIT gets it right (PubMed). Harder still is getting sleep stages to be correct. No consumer-grade device can do that accurately. In fact, it's virtually impossible for any wearable to correctly guess sleep stages and the gold standard measurement requires independent observers to agree on sleep stages. However, because EMFIT is measuring movements on more than your wrist it has more data points to, in theory, get closer to true sleep stages. I don't know how close they get but I'd trust them more than almost any wearable. [gallery size="medium" columns="2" ids="71021,71020"] Whilst the nightly view of sleep stages is occasionally interesting, perhaps more useful is the trend of stages over time. You might see patterns emerge as to when you have more physically restorative deep sleep. It would be good to combine this data with your workout (strain) data so that you can make educated visual links or for EMFIT to perform correlations. Trend Data As the weeks of training fly by, you can start to build up some great longterm trend data like this view of HRV range readings. or like this for sleep stages [caption id="attachment_71145" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Sleep stages over time[/caption] QS EMFIT Data Accuracy With over a month of data, I find no correlation between any of EMFIT, WHOOP, Oura and HRV4Training - either baseline correlation or day to day correlation. HRV4Training works on a single morning reading whereas Oura and WHOOP work similarly to EMFIT using an all-night average, so I would expect the latter two to correlate with each other and with EMFIT. nada. Other researchers do find correlations between these two methods and I would at least expect/hope to find a correlation between EMFIT and Oura. I'll update this table after a few months. [caption id="attachment_71025" align="aligncenter" width="1211"] Baseline correlation & day-to-day correlation to EMFIT[/caption] Other The most useful integration for athletes is for EMFIT to update Training Peaks with nightly sleep quality data. Other than that we have the Coach View - If you have access to more than one device then you can view the dashboard for every device. Normally this would be for a coach to switch between the sleep data of different athletes. [gallery size="medium" ids="71072,71071"] IFTTT Integration - I am not sure of the extent of support for IFTTT by EMFIT as I couldn't get it to work. From what I have read there are simple events like bed exit or gone to sleep that can be used to trigger events on other smart devices. Perhaps you could trigger a Google/Apple Home nighttime routine when you have gone to bed, as an example. Finally, there's also a live monitor which does what it says on the tin. This is probably a cross over feature from their products aimed at elderly people, children or others where some form of immediate external monitoring is wanted. What's Missing in EMFIT EMFIT is very much a data collection tool with a nice visual layer to let you see trends and perhaps some details if you have the time to drill down into them. However, once the novelty of this type of product wears off most people will not use it every day. In my opinion, it needs an alerting feature to make you aware of, say, a particularly bad night's sleep or some unusual behaviour that might indicate illness of some sort. EMFIT is such a great way to collect data but I fear that there are few other places that can make use of it beyond the main sports training platforms; even then, Training Peaks, do accept the data but not much else is done with it. Other apps exist that are great places to analyse sleep, like WHOOP or Oura but (kinda obviously) they want you to look at their sleep data rather than that from EMFIT. Ultimately EMFIT needs to link data back to Google FIT or Apple Health so that more specialist analytical apps can make good use of it without needing special permissions from EMFIT (that's where IFTTT comes in I guess!). Take Out EMFIT is a great way to capture nightly sleep data. Perhaps the best way. I stick by my review of the Gen 1 product all those years ago "a great product which far exceeded my expectations." I've not fully validated the Gen 2 accuracy to my liking but having used the Gen 1 product for years I'm virtually certain I'll be happy with Gen 2 going forwards. I love how the dashboard works in exactly the same way regardless of the computer or smartphone you use to access it and that the data is easily understandable with very many interesting facets and trends to immerse yourself in. For athletes, EMFIT becomes a tool for data collection and then sending your data to your coach/Training Peaks. Sure, it could be more open to other apps but Training Peaks and the coach dashboard probably cover most of the bases. Whilst the sleep score and recovery indices do give me an idea of my recovery, I want readiness spelt out to me more clearly and I want to better understand readiness from 3 different perspectives - EMFIT (nightly HRV), Training Load/TSB and subjective feel. Only I, or a coach, can then really make a fully informed decision about today's readiness to train. EMFIT has several nice touches, like IFTTT integration but I doubt that's used much. The subscription pricing will not be for many of you, however, it's the only way that niche companies can survive with products that effectively never need replacing. Just like a car service you need to ensure that your sleep guru keeps running. Plus the pricing is not so bad considering that EMFIT is a pro-athlete level solution. If you want a pretty $5 sleep stages app there are plenty of those but 99% of them are complete rubbish. EMFIT is a great Pro Athlete Tool and I like it and always have, all the way back to Gen 1. QS EMFIT Price, Discounts & Availability A free device and 3-year subscription is 199.00€ and is only available directly from EMFIT.com

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