How Discovery will pay you to get better sleep

Discovery Vitality’s Sleep Rewards has (finally!) launched, and members with an active Vitality Health membership, as well as members of its medical aid scheme (DHMS) who have personal health pathways activated, can now earn weekly rewards for improving their sleep habits.

It announced Sleep Rewards in October, but no firm launch date was confirmed at the time.

Members need to activate (in other words, opt into) the benefit, which runs weekly from Saturday (Friday night’s sleep) to Friday (Thursday night’s sleep).

For night-shift workers or others with forced irregular sleep patterns, as an example, sleep sessions will be allocated to the day on which they end.

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Each night that users track their sleep using devices including Apple Watch, Garmin devices, the Oura Ring 4 as well as Samsung wearables, Discovery will calculate a sleep score out of 100.

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This, according to the group, is “based on your sleep data as well as clinical, lifestyle, and demographic factors”.

The three factors are duration, regularity and quality.

Importantly, its sleep score will differ from the device’s own score, as they use different algorithms that prioritise each factor differently.

Discovery says: “As we learn more about your sleep habits, we will provide a personalised focus area and recommend a sleep start time to help guide your improvement. Your focus area highlights the sleep behaviour – including regularity, duration or quality – that is likely to have the greatest impact on your overall sleep health.

“To generate these personalised insights, you need to track at least 14 sleep sessions over a six-week period using your wearable device. This does not impact on your ability to earn a Vitality Sleep Score for sleep events tracked where these personalised insights are not available.”

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The matrix for Vitality is complex, and the weekly goal is, like with active rewards, dynamic. This means it adjusts downwards if you miss a goal, for example.

It says goals will adjust over time to support members’ progress. And that it may “increase as your sleep improves, stay the same to maintain consistency, or decrease where appropriate to remain achievable”.

Score
Duration
Regularity
Quality (REM and deep)

75+
Excellent
Excellent
Good

70+
Excellent
Good
Good

70+
Good
Excellent
Good

60+
Excellent
Excellent
Fair

60+
Good
Good
Good

50+
Good
Needs improvement
Fair

The exact breakdown is nuanced:

Duration is measured as the total time spent asleep, with the brackets defined as follows: excellent (seven to eight hours), needs improvement (less than six or more than nine hours), and good for the ranges in between (six to seven hours or eight to nine hours).
Regularity focuses on how consistently you fall asleep. Within 30 minutes is an excellent score, good is between that and an hour, while ‘needs improvement’ is more than an hour away from the time you usually fall asleep.
Quality “reflects how restorative your sleep is. It’s based on the proportion of REM and deep sleep you get each night, as measured by your device. Each sleep stage is measured separately using the same ranges:

Good: More than 15%;
Fair: 11% – 15%; and
Needs improvement: 10% or less”.

Upon achieving a weekly sleep goal, where the ‘main’ goal is 75 points a night, you will be awarded points or instant rewards.

To achieve this ‘main goal’, users are required to achieve an ‘excellent’ duration score (seven to eight hours) and get to bed “within 30 minutes of the time you usually fall asleep”.

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However, it is unlikely that, as with fitness goals, your weekly goal will be 525 points (75 x seven days). The insurer will understand, like with workouts, that sustaining completely perfect weeks is unsustainable.

It says “goals are capped to ensure they remain realistic based on your habits and health”.

At this point, the weekly rewards are 200 Discovery Miles (equal to R20, or more on D-Day (the 15th of each month) or rewards from partners, which are mostly free hot drinks (coffees) from Vida e Caffè, Mugg & Bean or Kauai.

You can also donate your weekly reward through Vitality MoreToGive. Rewards remain available to be selected in the app until the following Friday.

For now, the ability to track sleep through the Discovery iOS and Android apps is not yet available. In addition, the earning of Vitality points for good sleep habits is yet to go live.

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