If you use a fitness tracker or smartwatch from one of a few prominent manufacturers — Google, Samsung, or Xiaomi — you’ve probably noticed that your sleep habits are described in a kind of strange way. Each of these companies assigns an animal whose sleep patterns loosely resemble the wearer’s: Google’s Fitbit has giraffes, dolphins, and parrots; Samsung compares wearers to lions, penguins, and sharks. But what’s up with this trend, and what are these animals actually describing?
What are sleep animals, and where did they come from?
Fitbit began testing its Sleep Profile Animal feature in beta in 2021, but Samsung was the first to fully roll out a sleep animal feature in early 2022 in an update to the Galaxy Watch 4. Fitbit followed soon after in June of the same year. Xiaomi’s Mi Band trackers offer a similar feature.
For its part, Samsung didn’t go into much detail around the rollout of its Sleep Symbol Animals, which are still part of Samsung Health and assigned for users who wear a Galaxy Watch or Galaxy Ring to bed for at least a week. Google was a little more forthcoming in its announcement: at the time, it said that Sleep Profile Animals make
