Let this be a trigger warning to any obsessive-compulsives, but a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association claims your wearable fitness tracker might not be worth shit. In fact, it might be incorrectly counting your footsteps by a wide margin (i.e., failing at its one task).
After loading up participants’ arms, waists, and pockets with pedometers, smartphones, and trackers, and sticking them on treadmills, JAMA found variances of up to 22 percent between steps counted to the observed number of steps taken. That’s kind of a lot. It’s like falling down the stairs to the Chariots of Fire theme and calling it cardio. By contrast, Mother Jones reports that smartphones showed only a 6 percent range.
As always, a little perspective is in order. What’s the worst case scenario here? As long as people are walking more and driving less does it really matter how many strides are involved? (Well, if you’re using a Pavlok, the wearable tech that administers an electric shock for failing to live up to your New Year’s resolution, it might be a different story.)
Of course, if you’re dropping $100 on a tracker you want it to accurately tally the 27 steps you took to dump that bottle in the recycling and get another Lagunitas, dammit! And if all this weren’t enough to send users into an existential tailspin, there’s also a report in TechCrunch that Fitbits are still causing rashes too. It was originally thought that nickel in the band caused inflammation, but after a product recall, a subsequent redesign that uses less nickel is still producing unsightly wrist eczema. (Fitbit’s coy diagnosis? Could be soap, could be sweat. Fitbit’s prescription? Take the thing off once in a while.)
Or you could just give up. The JAMA study found that that’s what one-third of users did after six months of wearing a tracker anyway. That couch is looking so comfy right now and it’s only 14 steps away, plus or minus ten.
[Via Mother Jones; TechCrunch; photo courtesy of ThinkStock]
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