Fitbit vs Garmin – A battle between two fitness giants that has been debated for some time. Fitbit is one of the best known fitness tracker companies on the market. The brand received the “Kleenex effect” …
Most wearable devices today also come with optical heart rate sensors. Some devices record your heart rate throughout the day, some record every few minutes, and others only record when you manually press a button or start a workout. Active and resting heart rates, heart rate zones, and other important heart rate details are also inaccurate most of the time.
Optical pulse sensors work by sparkling a LED straightforwardly onto your skin and checking how that light reflects off your veins. The sensors in your fitness tracker then collect all of that information and process it into easy-to-understand pulse readings.
Notwithstanding, there are various variables that can slant this information. The color of your skin, the amount of hair on your wrist, and how tightly you are wearing your tracker can all affect your active and resting heart rate numbers. Even the modules themselves are not created equal. Different fitness companies get heart rate sensors from different companies, and some of those sensors aren’t all on the same level. Think of them as smartphone screens – you might have a nice AMOLED screen on your Samsung and LG phones, but one of them is a few generations ahead of the other.
Steps and heart rate are just two metrics. Fitness activity trackers also estimate calorie burn, sleep stages, and more. All of these metrics will look slightly different on each tracker you use and how you use it.
“But I am paying a company to track my activity! You should expect them to do it accurately. “
No, no, I hear you. You want to spend money on something that works as intended. I also want fitness trackers to be more accurate, but that’s not the world we live in.
As a general rule of thumb, we should give more weight to the top trends our fitness trackers take, rather than taking each measure as fact.
If your heart rate sensor detects a rapid drop in your heart rate when you take a walking break on your run, isn’t that more important than being 100% accurate? Personally, I would say so.
Also, the number of steps we take in a day is a good metric to track, but it doesn’t always tell the best story of your overall health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Heart Association (AHA), we should all strive for 150 minutes of moderate activity and 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week. Companies like Fitbit and Google are focusing their activity tracking around these metrics within the Fitbit app and Google Fit. I wouldn’t be surprised if more companies do the same in the future. It just bodes well to follow the length of our activities.To get more information visit at TechRogers.
