I
always wanted an activity tracker since they help you to keep track of your
activities such as number of steps taken, calories burn etc… throughout the
day. My wife owns one and it looks pretty plausible to me get one. Also on the
other hand wearing an activity tracker with eating junk food and day dreaming
about your weight loss is preposterous too.
Activity
trackers use accelerometers, altitude meters, heart rate sensors, even GPS
sensors to detect the number of steps taken to calculate the walked or
travelled distance to predict the calorie burn which helps a person to keeps
track of the daily calorie intake which often helps to get an idea about the
life style. Recently activity trackers have been released into the market with
GPS sensors to calculate the calorie burn and workouts more accurately. Squeezing
lots of sensors into a tiny wearable device will result one to charge the
device every couple of days. All most all the time data can be transferred back
to the manufacturer or to a third party to view the interpreted results such as
the loss of the weight estimation to maintain a better life style.
My
wife owns a Garmin Vivofit, a nice piece of equipment which tracks the number
of steps taken, calorie burn, data and time with an activity level indicator.
The activity level indicator is unique to Garmin and it shows a tiny bar on the
Vivofit display to how much time your being inactive (see the Figure below).
One
advantage of the Vivofit is that the user does not have to charge the device regularly.
It uses two user replaceable batteries and Garmin claim the batteries will last
almost a year. This is a huge advantage over the competitors’ products which
must be charged for every 4-5 days in most cases. The other advantage I see in
Garmin Vivofit is that it is waterproof and Garmin actually recommends users to
wear the device for swimming. Only few activity trackers in the markets can be
worn while swimming in fact most of the activity trackers are splash proof (well
they are protective against an exposure to water for a little amount of time
under small water pressure. E.g, washing dishes and having a shower).
Detecting
the sleep via activity tracker is the latest improvement in activity trackers. However
Vivofit does not have the automatic sleep detection. Often the detection of the
sleep is achieved via analyzing the accelerometer data with possible data from the
heart rate monitor if presents. In Garmin Vivofit user has to input the bed
time manually to keep track of the sleep. You don’t need special application to
do that. Hence the same can be achieved a Google Spreadsheet. Furthermore
Vivofit is not equipped with an inbuilt heart rate monitor. User has to wear a
separate heart rate monitor around the chest to detect the pulses in Vivofit. I
am not quite sure whether anybody likes to wear one on the bed.
I
got a Fitbit Charge HR. It is fabulous, except the battery life. I have to
charge the battery for every 4 days and it is kind of weird. But compared to
the features it provides, I can bear the pain of charging my Fitbit. Fitbit
Charge HR has a continue heart rate monitor and automatic sleep detection
feature. I don’t have to enter from when to when I had the sleep, but my Fitbit
automatically detects the number of hours I slept from based on my movements
and also it reports the number of times I was awaken and restless. It is quite
pretty and interesting. Display of Charge HR is bit smaller than that of
Vivofit. However the display in Charge HR has a backlight. In fact it is made
from LEDs. You do not have to sync the Charge HR manually with the Bluetooth dongle
which was provided. Synchronization with Fitbit servers happens automatically. The
other feature what I like is the silent alarm. You can set maximum of 5 alarms
in your Fitbit Charge HR and the band will vibrate to wake you up. However the
higher the number of alarms you set, higher the power drawn from the battery. I
have my ever-loving mobile phone to wake me up in the morning. So I do not use
the silent alarm feature.
