Indians least active, second most sleep deprived: Fitbit data

Smart wearables like activity trackers and smartwatches have been helping people in achieving their fitness goals, saving lives (in the case of Apple Watch Series 4), and tracking their everyday activities. But ‘the other side’ of such trackers that hardly gets mentioned in the media is their ability to track people’s inactivity levels. According to data collected by Fitbit, India is the least active and second most sleep-deprived country in the world. Only Japanese sleep less than Indians.

Citing the Fitbit sleep data insights from across 18 countries, the US-based wearable maker says that Indians are the second most sleep-deprived people with an average nightly sleep of 7 hours 1 minute after Japanese who get an average sleep of 6 hours 47 minutes. The company says that it has collected more than 10.5 billion nights of sleep data over the years to innovate in this area of health to offer focused insights on inactivity levels of Indian users.

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

• Get the least amount of nightly sleep on average (after Japan) at 7 hours 1 minute, which is 48 minutes lesser than the average nightly sleep of users in the UK and 32 minutes lesser than average nightly sleep of Americans.
• Get 77 minutes of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep on average, which is the lowest in the world, just like Japanese who get the same amount of REM sleep on an average. REM sleep is crucial for emotion regulation, memory, and the peak stage of protein synthesis at the cellular level, which ensures the proper functioning of multiple processes in the body.
• Spend 57 minutes awake on an average every night, representing close to 13.5 per cent of their nightly sleep.
• The age-group 75 – 90 get the lowest sleep (6 hours 35 minutes on average) compared to other age groups, whereas users in the age group of 18 – 25 go to bed more than an hour later (12:33 AM) than users in 75 – 90 age group (11:22 PM).

When it comes to inactivity, the Fitbit data shows that Indians are the least active people with an average of 6,533 steps daily. This is the least amongst all 18 countries, which is 3,600 steps lesser than the average of the most active country – Hong Kong. Average active minutes (32) is also the lowest in the list.