Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Sort of off-topic, but what fitness gadgets do you all like?

I used a FitBit One for many years until I washed it recently and it died. Honestly, I never really looked at the data unless I expected it to be anomalous, even though I religiously carried it with me at all times. I bike 8-10 hours a week, so a few steps aren't really making a health difference for me.

The big thing that annoyed me about FitBit is that Apple has a reasonably useful thing for collecting all your health information on your iPhone, but FitBit refuses to participate (no doubt because it would cost software engineering time and reduce the number of "premium" subscribers).

All-day heart-rate tracking would be interesting, but I already wear a watch and I'm not going to wear a second one. (And I doubt you'll talk me out of wearing my Speedmaster. Maybe Patek makes a fitness-tracking watch :P)

Everything sleep-tracking related has terrible reviews, from my research. I would love to know exactly how much time I spend in bed, but nothing will collect the data for me without buggy apps and overcomplicated made-up analysis and whatnot ("you spend 3.7 minutes in REM" uh huh.)

I'm strongly considering just putting a pressure sensor under one of my bed's legs, connecting it to some WiFi-enabled resistance reader, and using that. It's surprising to me that nobody makes a product in this space that does one thing and does it well. I am also surprised that people like wearing things to bed. Like I'll remember to do that.

For biking, I think I already own every gadget there is. I've seen that there are now muscle oxygenation sensors (presumably for measuring when you're riding at lactate threshold), but the reviews say the devices basically just return random numbers and you might as well use a power meter and do an FTP test every couple months (which is good, but some days I feel like I can ride at my FTP forever, so I wonder how accurate these 20 minute tests are).

All in all it seems like people are interested in collecting data about themselves, so companies are racing to build devices to fill the gap with random numbers :P

The most frustrating part is the isolation of the different fitness social networks. I have family and friends using Runkeeper, Strava, etc whereas I have to use Garmin Connect with my Garmin device(s).

I have found Tapiriik[1] to be invaluable in keeping these different apps/fitness networks synchronized.

[1]: https://tapiriik.com/

Garmin Connect can auto-upload to Strava and TrainingPeaks (which are what I use). I have an Edge 1000 and my ride is on all three sites before I even make it up the stairs to my apartment.

But yeah, the isolation is annoying. I don't really mind for cycling, Strava is the social network everyone uses, and the analysis tools are pretty good. (I like TrainingPeaks because you can download a ZIP file with every ride ever for further analyses you may come up with in the future.)

Garmin Connect devices are supported by the major ecosystems, Runkeeper, Strava, the MyFitnessPal/MapMyRun ecosystem, and the Runtastic ecosystem.

It also connects to both Google Fit and Apple HealthKit to do cross-ecosystem syncing when there isn't native support.

Generally, if your app/ecosystem doesn't support Garmin, Fitbit, Jawbone (which is now dead), and Google Fit/Apple Healthkit/Microsoft Health (for phone driven pedometer), you don't exist.

Also, Tapiriik is basically pointless: Google Fit/Apple Healthkit/Microsoft Health were all invented to break up the closed ecosystem bullshit. The data is mine, either give it to me via a public major API, or I'll let someone else track it for me.

I have a Charge HR.

Battery is good, since the most recent update, previously it was terrible.

FitBit's sleep tracking is pretty accurate in my experience. It even gets my naps. It doesn't do REM vs non-REM, but it's good enough for duration tracking.

The sync functionality is abysmal though. Half the time it doesn't work or takes minutes which would be solved if they bothered to make a dedicated 'sync' function on the hardware. Instead you have to hope that the software and tracker coincidentally communicate (which also means that the tracker has to continually poll Bluetooth, wasting power).

The pedometer is very accurate, it gets each footfall most of the time.

But... it doesn't integrate with many apps which is annoying (e.g. Google Fit).

I mostly use it for the heart tracker, since that's pretty much the only useful metric for health that it can provide. The calorie count is very optimistic, for instance, but you can compare lazy vs active days.

It's probably not for you, given the speedmaster & the biking, but I like my Withings Activite. Looks like a normal analog watch with a activity level dial, and integrates with Apple Health via Withings' app, which is nicely designed. Regular watch battery.

Edit: I would also be interested if anyone knows of an automatic (mechanical) watch with a pedometer complication. Seems like it wouldn't be too far off from the power-reserve dials that some fancy automatics have.

Have you tried SleepCycle? Marketed as an alarm-clock but it has some relatively useful sleep analysis dashboards.

Haven't tried it. I only sleep with my phone in the bedroom when I'm oncall, otherwise, whatever the phone wants out of me can wait until I wake up.

If it works based on sound, that won't work either, because I sleep with air cleaners running on high in the room (and earplugs).

SleepCycle is accelerometer based, actually. You put the phone next to you or under your pillow, and it tracks your motion based on vibrations in the bed. I believe the app tells you flat out that it won't work on memory foam beds.

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