This probably won’t come as much of a surprise, but I’m a fan of gadgets. Whether it’s a consumer gadget you can buy from Best Buy, or some new piece of technology installed in a business, I’m always drawn to new toys to play with.
Over the last year, there have been several gadgets that have caught my eye, either because I’ve read about them or because I’ve used them personally. I wanted to take some time to write about my impressions, mostly because there are several themes that seem consistent across consumer electronics recently — themes that, unfortunately, don’t always help the consumer or improve the product.
For this first post, I want to look at health gadgets — FitBit, Apple Watch and the like. While their core idea is great (and has certainly caught on with consumers), their foundation isn’t keeping up with the latest medical research.
The transition from college to day job was tough on me for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest hurdle to get over was sitting in the same place for eight hours a day. I’m not a particularly active or sporty individual, but at college I would still walk back and forth between classes several times a day — which was at least 10-15 minutes per trip. Once I left college, I no longer had a schedule that promoted exercise. My office was too far away to walk to, and programming isn’t exactly a physical activity — and so, as a result, I gained weight.
At the time, the idea of a fitness device didn’t really exist. The closest analogue was a pedometer, which allowed you to count how many steps you had taken in a particular day. It’s not a bad metric, but it doesn’t take into account the kind of steps you’re making — is it a leisurely stroll through the park, or an intense 100 meter sprint? They encouraged fitness, but they didn’t help much with weight loss.
The companies building these devices realized this too, and before long, they introduced more sophisticated technology. Heart rate monitoring and GPS features are now common, and help answer the questions of how far and how intense.
While these improvements help, they don’t immediately translate into losing weight or becoming more fit. For example, speaking personally, the devices were happy to tell me how many calories I had burned based on the activity it measured, but that didn’t seem to translate to the scale when I weighed myself.
As research on the human body continues, it’s becoming increasingly clear that fitness is complex and multi-faceted. Weight loss isn’t a simple calories-in/calories-out equation, and, even if it was, today’s devices don’t do a good job of counting them. In fact, they’re really only good at tracking one thing: cardio fitness. Due to steadily advancing heart rate monitoring technology, they can not only tell you your heart rate, but also provide an estimate of VO2 Max and sinus rhythm.
But when it comes to weight and nutrition, these same devices fail miserably. There are several reasons for this; but, at a high level, it all circles back to the concept of calories. Determining the calorie content of food is challenging at best — even if you get a reasonable estimate, the amount of calories your body actually uses is different from person to person and not easily calculated. This then leads to the amount of calories you burn overall — which also differs from person to person, and is impossible to calculate based on steps and heart rate alone (not that this stops most fitness devices from attempting to do so). Finally, there is the spot where these two metrics collide: how much of the calories you consume are burned by the body to keep you alive and sustain you through exercise? It probably wouldn’t surprise you at this point to learn that there is no easy way to calculate this either. It all depends on a person’s individual metabolism and efficiency at processing food, something that can’t be determined by a device strapped to your wrist.
While I’m sure there are technology companies attempting to solve this fitness black hole, there have been no viable innovations yet. But more importantly — and more damning — is that today’s fitness devices continue the illusion that they can accurately count the number of calories you burn and, if you log the food you eat, accurately count the number of calories you consume. This results in misleading data and frustrated users who appear to be consuming less calories than they burn, but still gain weight.
There is considerable inertia when a company dominates a segment of the industry and everyone else tries to catch up. FitBit is the unquestioned leader in the space, and so they have the luxury of shaping what a fitness device should be. People also gravitate toward the simple numbers presented by their devices: step count, calories burned, etc. As a result, competitors are hesitant to stray from what is familiar — they either add questionable novelties that only compound the problem of using steps and calories, or they innovate on the external look of the device.
None of this is good enough. It all amounts to excuses — reasons to not stray from the status quo because it could fail. To be sure, these aren’t trivial issues to overcome; but misleading users and the status of their health is not something to be taken lightly. Technology is a large part of our lives. Now more than ever, we need to question the information we receive from them to ensure it makes our lives better instead of reinforcing a false sense of security.