At the beginning of the year, Basis Science's co-founder and COO Bharat Vasan told MobiHealthNews that the Basis Band's new sleep tracking features were "almost clinical grade."

“With advanced sleep analysis we are able to do REM sleep, which nobody else can do, and which is what your mind needs to consolidate memories,” Vasan said at the time. “[We can do] deep sleep, which your body needs to recover. As well as things like toss and turn, sleep score, interruptions, benchmarking against where you have been and where you are headed.”

Now Basis, which was acquired by Intel in March, is continuing to pursue sleep tracking as a differentiator from the competition. The company has teamed up with the Stress and Health Research Program, a joint venture between the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center (SFVAMC), and the Northern California Institute of Research and Education (NCIRE), none of which were compensated by Basis for their role in the research. 

Researchers compared sleep data from the Basis Band to data from polysomnography, the standard of care for clinical sleep assessment. It was a small study -- only 12 participants were monitored for one or two nights each, for a total of 19 nights of sleep data. The Basis Band and polysomnograph each tracked the patients' sleep states (REM sleep, deep sleep, and light sleep) as well as their sleep duration. For the former, there was a correlation of r = 0.92 between the Basis Band and the polysomnograph, a fairly high score (a perfect correlation would be 1.0). For sleep duration, the average difference between polysomnography and the Basis Bands' readings was 4.3 percent. The data that has been released is still preliminary.

Basis also announced today that a new sleep tracking feature would be made available to its users, a weekly sleep report generated by their Basis Band and sent to their email.

"This is the most detailed sleep analytics report available from a health and fitness tracker, which often will only break out a comparison of sleep vs. activity," a company spokesperson told MobiHealthNews in an email. "Previously, the Basis app and web dashboard would show sleep information night-by-night, but will now provide more context and insights for users by summarizing a full week of sleep."

The report will include sleep duration, sleep score, number of tosses and turns, and number of interruptions. Weekly reports will help users compare weekend and weekday sleep and spot other trends in their sleep patterns, and Basis Band will also send sleep tips with the weekly emails.