Is your fitness tracker LYING to you?

Posted August 20, 2015 1:02 pm by healthclubnews

They are designed to encourage people to exercise more and lead healthier lifestyles.

But many fitness trackers provide wildly inaccurate measurements of the amount of activity people are actually doing, according to a new study.

Researchers tested a number of popular consumer activity monitors and found that many of them struggled when estimating calories burned during strength training and while sitting still.

Yang Bai, a kinesiologist at Iowa State University who led the research, found that while most of the trackers gave a good overall estimate of calories burned they were less accurate when measuring specific activities.

However, their ability to monitor specific activities varied greatly, with both the Shine and the Fitbit Flex performing poorly for aerobic activity.

The researchers said that the devices were also particularly poor at estimating the amount of activity people were doing when sitting down, often overestimating how much work they did.

Miss Bai said: ‘We spend a lot of time sitting around, watching TV, working with the computers and reading.’

… BUT THEY’RE STILL BENEFICIAL FOR MIDDLE-AGED WOMEN

While their accuracy is being called into question, one group are benefiting from the trend for fitness trackers – middle-aged women who are struggling with their weight.

In a clinical trial of fitness trackers, Dr Lisa Cadmus-Bertram, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that overweight middle-aged and older women who used a Fitbit got about an hour of additional exercise a week.

Meanwhile, a group of women who were given pedometers didn’t improve.

Dr Cadmus-Bertram thinks that if the women had received more support they might have experienced even bigger gains.

But the study involved a specific group of women – they were around 60 years old, white and affluent. And they still didn’t reach the activity goals that experts recommend.

The researchers tested the Fitbit Flex, Nike+ FuelBand SE, Jawbone UP 24 and the Misfit Shine.

Participants were asked to wear the devices while performing 25 minutes of aerobic activities like running, some strength training like lifting weights and 20 minutes of reading or using a computer.

They compared these to the accuracy of research grade monitors used by scientists to assess activity levels in athletes and patients.

Miss Bai said: ‘By looking at the most commonly performed activities in exercise and daily living settings, we can examine where the errors occur.

‘As expected, some monitors overestimate or underestimate all three activities, but some monitors overestimate one type and underestimate the other two categories, which can cancel out if we don’t measure them separately.’

The researchers said that of the commercially available fitness trackers, the Fitbit Flex came out as the most accurate overall while the Misfit Shine was the worst performer.

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