New Study Confirms Huawei Smartwatch Sleep Tracking Accuracy Near Gold Standard PSG
- Oct 7
- 2 min read
The integration of health monitoring into everyday wearables continues to rapidly advance, driven largely by artificial intelligence. Sleep is a critical health metric, yet the gold standard for measurement, Polysomnography (PSG), is known for its limitations, including high cost and inconvenience. Consequently, there is intense scientific interest in validating consumer devices.
A recent study published in PLoS One addressed a significant gap in research by assessing the performance of the HUAWEI WATCH GT2 against PSG in a Chinese clinical population—a focus previously dominated by Western brands like Apple and Fitbit. The study, which evaluated the GT2's accuracy across various sleep disorders, utilized participants recruited between March 2021 and April 2023. The device measures sleep status by leveraging heart rate and movement variation signals.
The core finding confirms the Huawei Smartwatch demonstrates high agreement in sleep tracking accuracy for general sleep/wake detection. The overall accuracy for distinguishing sleep from wake states reached 87.3%. For sleep/wake detection, the device's performance "almost reached" the standards expected of research-grade actigraphy. This supports the wearable’s potential as a low-cost tool for tracking general sleep health in real-world settings.
The GT2 tracks four sleep stages: awake, light sleep (N1 and N2 combined), deep sleep (N3), and REM sleep. While the agreement was high for sleep/wake classification, the sources caution that the device is not yet a suitable replacement for PSG in diagnosing sleep disorders. Specifically, the smartwatch demonstrated certain systemic biases: it significantly overestimated Total Sleep Time (TST) by about 28.5 minutes and Sleep Efficiency (SE) by 5.9 percentage points, while underestimating Wake After Sleep Onset (WASO) by about 37 minutes. Misclassifications were also high when classifying PSG REM epochs as light sleep.
Huawei utilizes its proprietary TruSleep™ technology for sleep stage detection, relying on the principles of heart rate variability and motion data. Furthermore, the brand continues to emphasize advanced health tracking capabilities, with sources reviewing new features that include the addition of blood pressure monitoring to its smartwatches alongside enhanced sleep tracking.
It is important for consumers and healthcare professionals to be aware of the tendency toward overestimation of sleep stages by the device. The study authors also noted key limitations, including the proprietary nature of the device's algorithm—which requires revalidation with every software update—and the limited scope of the single-center study.
Overall, the data on the Huawei Smartwatch Sleep Tracking Accuracy shows that while consumer wearables are becoming increasingly reliable for daily health monitoring, clinical diagnosis still requires the Polysomnography (PSG) gold standard.
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