![]() “At any moment your tracker could be 20 beats too high or low,” Cadmus-Bertram suggests. There have been several different studies that show fitness trackers and smartwatches are fairly good at measuring heart rate at rest or in recovery, but get less accurate as the intensity of exercise increases. When you get sweaty, they often fail to record your heart rate completely. “The problem is it really can’t know certain things about your body.”įitness trackers can be quite far out of step with your actual heart rate when you’re working out. ![]() “The devices that measure heart rate tend to be pretty good at measuring heart rate at rest but have a lot more variability when measuring heart rate during exercise,” says Cadmus-Bertram. Picking up a fitness tracker or smartwatch with a heart rate sensor is much easier and cheaper today than it used to be, but how accurate are these sensors? ![]() “Which helps a lot – the phone doesn’t have those additional data streams.” Measuring heart rate “Having those multiple data streams allows it to combine the heart rate data with the movement data to try to come up with a better guess,” explains Cadmus-Bertram. But the move to wrist worn trackers also opened the door for heart rate sensors. Manufacturers moved away from clip-on trackers because people would lose the devices, forget to attach them, or accidentally send them through the laundry affixed to pieces of sweaty workout wear. Consider that your phone isn’t always in your pants pocket no one wants a phone in their pocket when they’re working out and a lot of women’s clothing lacks pockets anyway. Your smartphone may be more accurate at counting steps, but it’s not a great alternative in the real world. Even if you wear your fitness tracker on your non-dominant wrist – which is the recommendation – it’s going to register all of your hand movements. Wrist worn devices are inevitably going to record a lot of extraneous movement that has little to do with physical activity. “At any moment your tracker could be 20 beats too high or low.” “A smartphone worn in a pants pocket should be able to calculate steps very accurately.” “The hip is really the best place for measuring steps and also most types of physical activity,” says Cadmus-Betram. ![]() Step counting may have been more accurate with early clip-on devices that were designed to be worn on the hip. “With two main caveats – people who move very slowly or have unusual gaits typically find that their steps are undercounted, sometimes by quite a lot and that’s true even with research grade pedometers.”įor most people the counts are pretty good but check your step count on two different fitness trackers or compare it to your smartphone’s estimate and you’ll see differences. “Measurement of steps tends to be pretty accurate,” says Cadmus-Betram. The question is: Can you trust your fitness tracker to accurately measure your progress? The goal of 10,000 steps a day may be arbitrary, but there’s no disputing that more activity is better for you, and it provides a nice, neat number for people to shoot for. The shallow end of fitness tracking is a simple step count. You’ll find most of the same features that you can expect to find in dedicated fitness trackers in all of the best smartwatches too. They generally also provide some estimate of your energy expenditure or calories burned, and they may estimate your sleep quality. The hidden psychological drawback of fitness trackersĪmazon cuts prices on Samsung Gear Fit and Fitbit Alta activity trackersĪlmost all fitness trackers count your steps and distance traveled, and it’s increasingly common to measure heart rate. ![]()
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