Tracking my health with the new Fitbit Versa

I recently upgraded from a Fitbit Inspire to the Versa version. The Versa comes with a lot of health tracking features however I am still in the process of figuring out how to make the best use of them.  

The Versa provides you with two scores every day: a sleep score and a stress score. The sleep score is calculated based on data such as how long you slept, how long your deep sleep phases are and you pulse while you are asleep. The stress score is calculated based on changes of your pulse, your sleep patterns and your activity level.

So far I think the sleep score is quite accurate as usually when I have the feeling I didn’t sleep well the score is quite low. For the sleep score, a low score means bad quality sleep. The stress score I am not sure about as I got low scores when I didn’t feel that stressed. For the stress score, a high score means little stress.

However, when living in a busy city like Tokyo you sometimes get caught up in the many things you have to do every day that you might not realize you how stressed you actually are.

The Versa also provides mindfulness features from short 2 minute sessions to longer meditation sessions. During the mindfulness sessions, it can track your skin sensitivity by placing your hand on the device.

So far I get the impression that the Versa provides a lot of data but you don’t really know what to do with it. It does not really give you advice on how to improve your sleep and stress scores.

However, more features might become available in the future.

As for now, I think you could use it to try to discover patterns in your scores to find out what you could change. If for example you always have a bad sleep score on Mondays it might be because your bedtime is different on weekdays and on weekends.

The mindfulness feature is quite nice as you can use while on the train or waiting for the train as long as you have about 2 minutes to spare. So far the device did not drastically change my life for the better but it is nice to have and compared to the apple watch quite affordable. Amazon Japan also has a nice variety of third party bands you can choose from the match the Versa to your outfit.