Review: Basis Peak – Fitness and Sleep Tracker

– Very Useful Visible Display

– Luxury Comfort

From the time you open the packaging (which feels like opening an expensive watch) to the point you put the Basis on your wrist, every moment is comfortable. The lining 7of the wrist band is luxurious, a silky yet somehow sweat-resistant material that just feels good on your skin.

I was worried the device might irritate my sensitive skin after a sustained period, but it hasn’t. I sometimes have to loosen it during arm-intensive exercise like weight-lifting or biking, but that is totally reasonable.

– Biking Autodetect

Here my Basis detected that I walked in the afternoon, biked in the morning.

Areas for Improvement with the Basis Peak

– Disjointed Data

My biggest complaint about the Basis is that it breaks fitness and sleep down into segments and lists them individually rather than summarizing them more intuitively.

On this night, Basis decided I slept in 2 parts. Sometimes it’s 3 or 4. Maybe I pee, maybe I turn over, but for me, it is one night’s sleep. Yet Basis offers no consolidated view of my overall sleep duration or quality. This is the norm for me. Clearly they don’t know about second sleep.	Here, I took a hike and broke into a jog at a few points. Basis split this hike into 5 different segments. On the upside, I can see the totals for the day in the black band at the top. On the downside, there is no total for just “the hike”. I have to do manual calculations to derive those stats.

I can see how breaking the data up makes sense to an engineer – the raw data has different patterns in it. But to a human, this is not logical. I slept ONCE. I hiked ONCE. I want a summary of each one, not 5 different charts. Note: Apparently the Basis website does summarize daily sleep duration, but the primary mobile app interface does not.

– Large, Masculine Form Factor

– Overestimated Sleep Duration

Overestimating the length of a night’s sleep is a problem across the board with ALL passive sleep trackers, including the Basis. Any sedentary evening or morning activity gets lumped into sleep. This is the tradeoff for not having to manually track sleep. For now, passive data collection means less accurate data.

I frequently read at night, sometimes for hours. This is not sleep – I am awake and accomplishing something. Last week, Basis reported that I slept up to 11.5 hours a night because of this, when the real max was under 8.25 hours. Basis does a significantly better job of autodetection on nights when I don’t read or relax before bed, but since that’s sporadic, my sleep data is generally unreliable.

Side note: Jawbone has maintained a partially manual sleep function, which in fact makes it the most accurate. You can press a button when you get into bed to enter sleep mode, but if you forget or choose not to, the Jawbone still autodetects your sleep passively. The difference is that you actually have to review (and optionally correct) the autodetected sleep duration before it will show up in your daily activity. This is a really simple process, and merely by adding this trivial review step, the Jawbone data becomes exceedingly more accurate.

I’d rather have correct data than a completely passive device.

Comparing the Basis to Competitors

Sleep Comparison

^**deducted 1 star because of Jawbone bugs

I’ve found that Sleep Duration and Awakenings are the 2 most reliable indicators of sleep quality. You don’t really need a device to tell you that you woke up in the night though, unless you unknowingly suffer from sleep apnea.

Fitness and Function Comparison

Here’s a comparison of the devices I’ve used recently, in terms of fitness and non-sleep functionality.

^* “Habits” are behaviors encouraged by the Basis app, such as walking at different times of the day (“Afternoon Lap”, “Morning Lap”), standing up and moving periodically (e.g. every 1 hour) to be less sedentary, hitting a certain level of activity or calories a certain number of times per week. These are all user-configurable and sound very promising in theory. But there are significant design issues still to be resolved to make them actually useful. For example, there is no inactivity alert to tell you that you haven’t stood up in an hour, despite the fact that the device is measuring this and knows that you’ve configured a Habit because you want to do it. For some Habits, there are sporadic reminders that come at odd times. I got a reminder to take an Afternoon Lap shortly after a 10,000 step hike. The potential for this feature is really great, it just needs some more work.