I find sleep data to be notoriously hard to correlate to reality. I’ve used a variety of devices over the years to track sleep and sometimes it is really hard to correlate it with my actual experience. Thus far, the Oura Ring has been better at this than any other device I’ve used. What it shows me aligns well with my perceived experience.

This week we setup the Eight Sleep and just like the Oura Ring, it also tracks your sleep and gives you a view of the various stages of sleep. I was super intrigued to see if the Oura Ring and the Eight Sleep would agree at all. I was skeptical and was expecting that they would produce very different data. I looked at three nights of data and to my surprise it was more correlated than I expected.

Some observations:

  1. The Eight Sleep generally interprets more Deep Sleep than the Oura Ring. I have no independent way to assess Deep Sleep.
  2. Generally the Oura Ring sees my waking periods much longer than the Eight Sleep. This is a little easier for me to asses, and I think neither is spot on. Both got some of this right and some wrong. Overall, the Eight Sleep data seems closer to reality.
  3. On the whole, the Oura Ring data presents a “less good” picture of my sleep patterns.

There isn’t a conclusion to draw from this since this isn’t a controlled study. However, the two data sources align much more than I expected. Comparing price of the two solutions isn’t meaningful since they do very different things. However, it is notable that a little ring on my pinky finger gets pretty close to a grid of sensors that is under my entire body as I sleep.