Yes, the number one fitness trend for 2017 is, for the second year in a row, the wearable tech that is fitness trackers. These little wristbands seem to be everywhere now, and their abilities keep growing. The first ones, if you remember when they came out only a few years ago, counted steps taken daily as an indication of overall health.
Today they have many functions – total time exercising per day, heart rate monitor, calories burned, distance run, time asleep, goal setting, etc. Of course they also integrate with personal fitness apps on mobile and laptop, and interact with social media. Doesn’t everything these days?
What are the benefits of using one of these devices? Firstly, they are motivating, as wearing one displays the fact that you take your health and fitness seriously. They also make visible your daily goals and thereby reinforce your aims. By linking to social media, where you can post your results, they add accountability to your efforts. They are not cheap, which can also be a motivation, as you’ll not want to waste the hard-earned money you spent buying it by not using it.
It’s still early days for fitness trackers, and consumers report some difficulties with their gadgets. Problems include inaccuracy in statistics, discomfort in wearing, poor battery life, and inability to discriminate between different activities. However with the speed of development in high-tech industries these glitches should soon be sorted out.
There are other considerations with wearing these devices though. They are tracking gadgets after all and the information they receive is also given out, not only to you. That intimate data about your physical health, daily routine and precise location is being sent to “the cloud” and is not always protected from interception by outside agencies.
This is a worrying aspect of the continued rise in usage of fitness trackers and one which we touched upon in a short post this year. However in this age of Big Data we feel it deserves an in-depth article which will appear on our site in the New Year.
So if you wear a fitness tracker or are thinking of buying one, you’ll want to read this and get the real facts. Drop by the site next month or sign up for regular updates by email.
Until then, keep fit and have fun!