Witness the fitness

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Health Report 28 min 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 4 days ago

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Why do people start using fitness trackers beyond casual running?

Joel Werner 0:11

Usually when I go for a run, I strap a smartphone to my arm and I use a running app to monitor my workout. But for a lot of people, activity monitoring is way more of a full-time pursuit. Yeah, so I got a fitness tracker in around May last year. This is my friend Keegan, and I'm sure we all know someone like Keegan. Someone who swears by these devices.

Keegan 0:31

Over the years I've lost weight quickly, put it on pretty quickly after celebrating the weight loss. So I wanted something that I could track and keep track of and stay on top of things. And how's it worked for you? It's really good. The best thing about it as opposed to any sort of other motivation is that it's always there. It's at your wrist and you go, you get a reminder that by the way you haven't messed many steps and coupled with the idea that my parents got one recently and there's a leader tally that you can compare yourself to in that tally and my dad always likes egg me on. So it's a community element as well as just motivating myself. So if you have a day off it drops down then you go all right well I'm gonna make up for it today and you make a double or nothing for the next day and have some bets and put some beers on it.

Keegan 1:13

So it's good.

Joel Werner 1:15

Hey,

Keegan 1:15

I'm Joel

Joel Werner 1:15

Werner and today on the Health Report we're gonna see how anecdotes squares up against science in the fitness tracker revolution.

Unknown 1:26

One hold one quest, witness the fitness, the confidence ever One hold one quest

Lucas Pivek 1:33

It's estimated that about one in six consumers in the United States use some form of wearable technology. Wristbands, smart watches,

Debra Lupton 1:41

belt, headbands, smart rings.

Lucas Pivek 1:44

We have a device that continuously tracks different behavioral or physiological parameters such as movement.

Debra Lupton 1:51

Distance.

Lucas Pivek 1:52

Perspiration, heart rate,

Debra Lupton 1:53

rate, breathing rate,

Lucas Pivek 1:54

calories, their diet, how many steps you did in particular day or temperature.

Debra Lupton 1:58

Temperature. Their sleep patterns, even their sexual activity. And

Lucas Pivek 2:02

this creates a kind of a historical profile of how you're doing.

Debra Lupton 2:05

So there's many, many aspects of our bodies these days that these devices can monitor and measure and and track.

Joel Werner 2:12

There's so much we could talk about when it comes to activity monitoring, but today we're gonna focus on consumer wearables. The kind of products that you'd buy off the shelf or the ones that you might already own.

Robert Furberg 2:24

These devices have been on the market domestically for I think about five years.

Joel Werner 2:30

Robert Ferberg is a senior clinical informaticist at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute in North Carolina.

Robert Furberg 2:38

I would say that what we see now in the last two years is this incredibly vibrant uptake of these devices that are intended to measure seemingly inconsequential things about an individual's daily life, and then convert those measurements into discrete data that can be used to provide feedback to individuals and hopefully aid them in kind of reaching some sort of positive health outcome. Well that was the motivation for David anyway.

David 3:07

Yeah, I mean

Joel Werner 3:08

we've been together eight He and his wife made a New Year's resolution that's probably familiar to a lot of us, to get fit and healthy. So they each bought a Fitbit, a popular wristband activity tracker, and for David at least, the device worked pretty much.

David 3:25

Much as you'd expect. So far, so good. I've actually lost about nine pounds, which is probably what I gained over the holiday week, to be honest. But at least I'm back to where I was before.

How does community and competition motivate tracker users?

David 3:35

It's helped me get more active. I've been hitting my step goal, walking more. I can't really have too many complaints about the tracker. But his wife, on the other hand, she nudged me in bed last week and said, Hey. I think something's wrong with my Fitbit. I saw that she had a accumulated ten hours in what they call the fat burning zone and her average heart rate was close to a hundred with, you know, spikes up to one fifteen. And that was a pretty normal day for her as far as working at her job. It wasn't like she was running a marathon or anything like that. I thought okay, maybe something's defective with the watch. Maybe for some reason the sensor's broken, or maybe she's not wearing it correctly, or maybe it needs to be reset or recalibrated in some way, shape, or form.