At the sidelines of the launch of the Fitbit Versa 2 and Fitbit Aria Air in Singapore yesterday, Louis Lye, Regional Director, Southeast Asia, Fitbit, shared its sleep insights on Singaporeans, who have an average nightly sleep of 7 hours 5 minutes are the third most sleep deprived after Japanese and Indians (who get an average sleep of 6 hours 47 minutes and 7 hours 1 minute respectively).

Based on aggregated and anonymised user data from 18 countries between August 1, 2018 – July 31, 2019, Fitbit shared that Singaporean users: 

• Get the least amount of nightly sleep on average (behind India and Japan) at 7 hours and 5 minutes which is 28 minutes lesser than the average nightly sleep of American users and 44 minutes lesser than the average nightly sleep of users in the UK.
• Get 80 minutes of REM sleep on average (one of the lowest globally behind Japan and India) – a crucial aspect for emotion regulation and memory and the peak stage of protein synthesis at the cellular level, which keeps many processes in the body working properly.
• Spend 57 minutes awake on average each night they sleep, representing close to 13.5% of their nightly sleep.
• Sleep later than users in most other countries: 12:11 AM on average.
• In the age-group of 55-75 get the lowest sleep (6 hours 53 minutes on average) compared to other age groups, whereas users in the age group of 18-25 go to bed an hour later (12:33 AM) than users in 75-90 age group (11:33 PM).

According to Fitbit, the company has collected more than 10.5 billion nights of sleep data over the years to innovate in this critical area of health shared focused insights gained on Singaporean users.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 

Just last month, Fitbit announced that it will be working with Singapore’s Health Promotion Board (HPB) on a population-based public health initiative, the company’s first major integration of a digital health platform and wearables into a national public health programme globally. The initiative, named Live Healthy SG, was designed for Singapore by Fitbit to harness technology, behaviour insights and analytics to help Singaporeans get healthier through meaningful and sustained behaviour change.

THE LARGER TREND

Sleep deprivation or lack of quality sleep seems to be quite common in busy urban settings, where lifestyles can be quite hectic. Sleep health is increasingly becoming a concern and many companies are seeing as an opportunity – even attracting non-conventional players such as the creators of the Pokémon Go mobile game, who will release a new app called Pokémon Sleep that will monitor players’ sleep and reflect their habits in game in 2020.

Even Apple is rumoured to add a sleeping tracking function to the Apple Watch in 2020, according to a MobiHealth News report in February this year.