Thursday, January 6, 2022

Mi Band 4 For Better Health Monitoring

For 2022 New Year, I got a gift of XiaoMi's hand wist device: Mi Band 4 NFC. I have been very interested in Apple Watch for long time. The only things put me on hold are its price and necessity of features I want. This time I got another alternative device to try.

The main interest is its spleep monitor feature. iPhone has a bed time feature in Apple's Clock app. However, it only sets times to the bed and out of bed, ie, bed times. It does not have a way to determin whether if I am really asleep or in deep sleep mode.

Mi Band 4 has a sensor on the back of the watch. This sensor seems being able to monitor my sleep mode: light sleep and deep sleep. The device has an iOS app called Mi Fit. From there I can see my sleep score and data in detail.

The app provides 2 comparisions of my sleep data to other people.

From Heart Rate item in the main screen, the rate information is available from the detail view,

and sleep rate is also avaible from there.

The app also syncs those data back to iOS Health. Unfortunately, it only syncs all light and deep sleep data, back to Health' sleep module as asleep data.

Sometimes, I do see some sleep data duplicated. This might be caused by multiple syncs.

Anyway, I like Mi Band 4 device very much. In addtion to its detail sleep information, it also monitor my heat beat, and movements(walking, running, and cycling). The most important feature is its long lasting battery life, up to 5 days a charge (comparing to Apple Watch 2 days for the most recent model).

UPDATE

I found another trick to record my awake time. When I awake in a night, for example, going to washroom, I shake my left hand with Mi Band on up and down 10 times. I think that this is the way to let the band detect I am really awake. I have tried sever nights, and it is accurate to record my awake time.

In terms of price, Mi Band 4 is about $40.00 on Amazon.ca as to the blog date.