Why does Fitabase offer several options when exporting Garmin sleep data?
Garmin may receive and process sleep data from devices throughout each night (before the sleep is complete) and the following day (after the sleep is complete). We pull data from them as soon as it’s made available to us.
Garmin categorizes their sleep data under certain validation levels that they define. Each night of sleep can have an instance of sleep data for each validation level captured by Garmin.
Different validation levels may result from:
- Participant devices being able to capture more advanced data in addition to basic data
- Additional processing of the data through Garmin’s backend systems
- Data originating from manually recorded sleep
- Participants editing sleep data through the Garmin Connect app or website
- Garmin identifying a sleep as complete (no further updates) or tentative (further updates may come in)
The result is that Fitabase may have multiple versions (validation levels) of sleep data for a single night of sleep for a single participant.
What data do you recommend I use?
We’ve done our best to make it as easy to consume and use this data as possible. The Most Complete Version option in Fitabase should match what Garmin displays in their application and website and will return a single version of sleep data for each night. We recommend this option for most customers unless you have a specific need.
We’ve outlined the various validation levels that Garmin provides in our Garmin Data Dictionary. They are listed there from lowest to highest priority. If you use the Most Complete Version option then you’ll get the highest validation level (so the one closest to the bottom of that list) that we have.
Note: Garmin sleep data in Fitabase charts and tables and downloaded from the Fitabase Sleep page is presented in Most Complete Version form.
How are the other export options different?
Tentative Version Only:
This option includes the best “tentative” version we have. This provides the most complete (latest and greatest) initial version of the data-- before Garmin did any additional processing on it.
Similar to the Most Complete Version option, we’ll give you a single set of data per night per participant and it’ll be the highest quality validation level we have (ENHANCED_TENTATIVE prioritized over AUTO_TENTATIVE). Note that this may differ from what participants see in the Garmin app/website if data for the FINAL validation level has been made available.
All Versions:
As the name implies, choosing this option will result in getting every version of the data we have for each night of sleep. This means you may have more than one version of data for each night of sleep for each participant. If you need a single set of sleep data for each night then you’ll need to filter this data after you download it.