Wearable Fitness Devices Don’t Seem to Make You More Fit | Hacker News Reader

Wearable Fitness Devices Don’t Seem to Make You More Fit

nytimes.com

54 pointsDiabloD354 comments

Like how having a clock doesn't necessarily make you better at time management, having a fitbit doesn't make you healthy. But it does allow you to measure things, and if you have the willpower to improve them, you'll improve them. But the device won't do it for you, at best it enables you. At worst, it gives you a false sense of accomplishment that should be checked once you get on the scale.

(Disclaimer: I love my fitbit, and it's helped me lose weight, but I find the step counter to be second to the heart rate monitor)

Yep, like anything else, it still requires effort. I've lost weight using my Apple Watch.

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple-watch-8-weeks-...

I'm currently using it to run 5k, a few days a week. Six months ago, I was using it to train for my first 10k.

It is almost as if tools themselves don't do the work on their own.

I started to make a point, then went to go read the article, and found that the article is not making this point at all. It's adding evidence to the position that exercise doesn't cause people to lose weight. They did the work, they didn't lose the weight.

A case of a bad headline, it seems.

I lost weight. I included my blog where I illustrated that. The problem with exercise is that you may burn 300-500 calories then eat that much extra food because you are now hungrier. Diet is still more important.

You also need to consider that when you lose 5 lbs of fat, for example, and gain 5 lbs of muscle, you weigh the same but you're definitely more fit.

You can't outrun your mouth.

It's much easier to control for your diet than exercise it away, because unless you're working out for 8-10 hours a day, you won't burn more than a few hundred calories. That's one shake at McDonald's or Starbucks dessert.

It’s hard for many to accept, so I’m going to state the results again: Those people who used the wearable tech for 18 months lost significantly less weight than those who didn’t.

In the IDEA trial, those who employed the technology were no more physically active than those who didn’t. They also weren’t more fit.

Let's say that again.

They also weren’t more fit.

You're ignoring empirical evidence. If what you say is true, they'd be more fit.

I've got one too, but if you accept this article as true it looks like it turns out at best it's no more than a pretty bangle, at worst makes you think you're doing more than you are.

i'm not sure where you are correcting the person you are responding to. It all seems consistent to me.

He says it "enables" him, the data shows it does not. It has a negative effect on weight and no effect on fitness.

If anything, it is damaging and according to this article, you should get rid of them.

On the average, you're right. People with Fitbits still lost weight, but less than the "control" group. So if the presence of a Fitbit is the only variable, then Fitbits have a negative impact. The study wasn't set up to test that one variable, so I'd be wary drawing such strong conclusions.

Your point is that the title is misleading. It's not that fitness devices don't make you more fit. It's that they make you less fit. And that's a big difference.

Individual "enablement" could be an outlier. I'd love to see a distribution of weight loss results in this study.

The article title is quite gentle compared to what's actually said in the article. But that wasn't my point.

The article draws the strong conclusion that fitness trackers are useless based on a study. The author compares them to fad diets, sold to the public before they're even properly tested. Now they've been tested and they don't work.

But when I came to this comment thread, the top comment is extolling how wonderfully enabling fitbits are apart from you just gotta have will power. According to one guy.

The article flatly contradicts his stance. According to the study results, on average, even the people with willpower got no fitter.

I doubt he read the article, I doubt anyone down voting anything I said did either.

First, you assume too much. I'm not a guy.

While I did read the article, I didn't read the underlying studies, mostly because they aren't freely available.

The way the studies are done though, each person has professional help monitoring diet, and a nurse. I've been through these kinds of programs before personally, and while the people are great, they are more checking in with you and making you accountable, which drives results. Obviously someone making a diet plan for you does no good if you don't follow it, just like how cardio doesn't do much for you if you aren't pushing your heart rate up.

In the article, the first study, called inconclusive, actually said that people with pedometers were more physically active.

Really, experimental method means everything. In the article, they say one group lost 14 pounds, and one on average lost 7. Over 2 years. That's honestly not a lot of weight lost (1 lb per month or less), and they didn't provide any statistics other than the average, which is typically misleading (some probably gained weight, some probably lost a lot of weight).

What you're saying is basically a study said when you measure something, you get worse at it. As if the Heisenberg uncertainty principal is at play. What I'm saying is that a tracker is a tool, and how and why you use that tool is incredibly important. Just like how you could say most people who buy a home gym don't use it, so therefore obviously buying a home gym makes you fat.

I believe I also said in my original comment, which you obviously read but missed the part where I said people could be treating this as an undeserved pat on the back.

In all of this, the experimental method is everything. Articles like this are written in a very fluffy style, making conclusions about causation that I find dubious.

Empirical evidence on an average does not mean that an individual anecdote is false.

I can echo cbanek's finding - I've been a competitive runner for 15 years, and there's a small inflection point in my results about 5 years ago when I got a GPS watch and heart-rate monitor. I was training and racing to the best of my abilities with the tools I had before, and when I got more abilities with the watch, I did better.

I suspect the difference is that some use the device as a crutch rather than a tool.

The abstract doesn't give enough information, so I'm connecting the dots. This may be addressed in the text...

It sounds like all the participants were put on a program, and then some were additionally were given a smartwatch (which negatively impacted their results).

But I can't see how you can conclude from there that the smartwatch won't help for individuals that are NOT on a program.

A potential explanation is that the watch has a moderating effect: it gives you an excuse to stop exercising once you hit your daily target, the more calorie tracking you do, the less you err on the side of caution, etc. Under that hypothesis, a smartwatch is still better than no program + no smartwatch.

You are largely correct, except the wearable tech was not a smart watch. It was a 2010-era fitness tracker one straps onto the arm. Definitely nowhere in the "pretty bangle" category. I think wearers would be less active because they wouldn't want to be seen in public with it.

A more detailed answer here: http://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/despite-reports-your-f...

I've lost weight with FitBit Blaze in conjunction with a decent calorie tracker app which makes it easy, like http://www.loseit.com/ .

While the former is informative (extra important as I have sleep issues which of course make me hungrier, and the fitbit does a decent sleep-tracking job...), I'm sure the latter is having a bigger impact overall.

I go to the gym in the mornings before work but I don't wear my fitbit or my android wear watch when I go. It's a crossfit style gym so I'm not running miles. Neither of my devices have heart rate monitors so they really can't measure much in terms of my activity levels other than the steps I take. I stopped wearing my fitbit because of how little I used it. I have an older model that only shows who is calling in addition to the typical fitness metrics (steps, floors, miles, etc) so my android watch is much more useful. I'm not the kind of person to always be shooting for a high score so how many steps I take during the day is irrelevant to my life.

I also find the step count to be mostly useless, but the heart rate tracker has been gold. I used to have a Polar HR monitor (that would strap across your chest) and this is just so much better. And being able to track my heart rate has made it so that I will push myself a bit harder because I know where my heart rate is at.

The biggest issue facing the wearable market is that, despite having all the data, I still don't know what to do with it. We need to correlate cause and effect. It differs dramatically between individuals, so what's true for me is probably not true for you. We have a battle between privacy and usefulness, in that we'd ideally feed data from millions of people into a machine learning algorithm to start helping people actually use and benefit from the data. However, most people don't want to share their intimate health data to the cloud.

Another huge issue is that we haven't nailed the input problem: wearables can measure our energy expenditure, but not our energy intake. Until we can measure that as accurately as heart rate (and not just calories, but the nutrient breakdown too) then we only have one side of the equation.

We still have a long way to go before wearables are truly indispensable, and that's before we start considering the emerging research on gut bacteria and the role it plays.

> Another huge issue is that we haven't nailed the input problem: wearables can measure our energy expenditure, but not our energy intake. Until we can measure that as accurately as heart rate (and not just calories, but the nutrient breakdown too) then we only have one side of the equation.

It's worse than you think. Humans expend almost exactly the same amount of calories until they get to extreme amounts of activity. The body simply shunts the available calories to different systems.

So, it's almost all about caloric intake.

See the latest Scientific American (dead tree edition) for a nice article about it.

Also, when you eat less your body temperature drops, so caloric intake has to ALSO be adjusted by a lot.

Wearables can't measure energy expenditure, at most they give you an overblown estimate that is only weakly correlated with actual expenditure.

The closest thing to measuring expenditure is a power meter on a bike or ergo, and then you still technically have to do a lab test measuring expired gases from your breathing to estimate efficiency.

Even a weak correlation is better than nothing, especially when increasing accuracy seems to require a very well equipped gym and a sports medicine lab.

Newtonian level of insight into fitness is super easy. (With Newtonian I mean enough true to get the work done, even if there is a higher level of truth underneath, i.e Einsteinian physics, quantum physics)

Weight delta = calories in - calories out

Health preservation requires adequate levels of protein (muscles) and fat (hormones)

Muscle growth requires caloric surplus, adequate protein availability and muscle breaks

Muscle breaking requires progressive overloading of muscles (i.e. do more/harder of the thing you want to get better at over time)

Micronutrients is a thing, so eat a balanced diet or take supplements.

With those five things, 99% of people can do anything they need around fitness.

Wearable fitness does very little for those five things.

Gathering data to further the development of Einsteinian level of insights is interesting - fitness certainly lags behind there, but I dont think any big breakthroughs in fitness will come from that, in the same way that Einsteinian physics didnt change how we build bridges or pipes.

The less sexy but much more interesting point is on changing behaviours around those five things. How do you design technology to change habits?

It is possible to change habits with technology. The obvious example is how mobile phones changed habits, for instance in how we make appointments, navigate and a multitude of other ways. Cracking how wearable fitness can change those is a much more valuable challenge in my view. Can we design wearable fitness that lets you exercise wherever you are?

Tap your fitness device and you're sent to the nearest gym, with a change of clothes and towels etc ready in a locker for you, and the device reading off your exercise plan? Tap it to get your personalized meal prepared for you at your nearest participating restaurant, or a shopping bag sent home to you.

That's where I see the future being for fitness technology - we know the right things to do, they are just awkward to do, so lower the barrier to doing the right things.

Issue with this is of course that calories out is not something we understand very well at all. some people burn more, some less. Sometimes it spikes for no reason while sitting in a chair. Sometimes it spikes when people are stressed. Sometimes it doesn't. These are only some of the pitfalls

Right, but you can control two of the parts of the equation fairly well - weight delta (scales, over time) and calories in (nutritional information).

You can treat all those spikes as random noise. They don't cancel out the overall trend.

Unless you have a chronic problem like anaemia, if you eat well, you (probably) don't need supplements. The industry is largely built on profiteering rather than tangible health benefits.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitam...

Digestive issues are more common than you might think and tend to get worse with age. Taking a 'daily' multivitamin 1-3 days a week is likely plenty and very cheap. They also become more important with calorie restriction or unusually poor diets.

In the UK people are recommended to take a vitamin D supplement, especially in winter, and children under 5 are recommended to take a vitamin supplement of A, C, and D. (Poor parents can get free vitamins for their children.)

And there's women who want to become pregnant (or who are pregnant) who should be taking folic acid.

The author, perhaps inadvertently, describes a confounding issue in the study that validates his claims. Namely, the issue stems from the author's description of how fitness trackers are useful in the initial stages of a diet/exercise plan in order to help establish a routine. However, the study that the author cites gave the fitness trackers to participants 6 months into the study, when hopefully some plan has been established. This would seem to negate one of the key benefits of fitness trackers espoused by the author. Is it explained why the fitness trackers are given later on as opposed to at the beginning?

Assuming that trackers have this habit-building effect: While we then would expect the effect to have have been larger if they'd handed out the trackers at the beginning of the study, some participants should have benefited from this effect even mid-study.

One hypothesis here is that the trackers provided a frame of reference that anchored participants to some goal like 10'000 steps daily while the participants who had less direct feedback were free to expand their goals as their fitness improved. Some things seem much more arduous to me when I track progress while doing them.

I bought my FitBit Surge for the GPS and heartrate monitor. That data means I can pace myself accurately when I'm running, allowing me to run further and more consistently (and at a faster overall average pace than stopping / starting all the time). It also means I can keep track of my heartrate (and recovery) during other intense workouts like CrossFit and Insanity.

My father has a FitBit too and likes to gloat about smashing my step count pretty much every single day. He's retired and out and about all day, while I sit at a desk.

Guess who's obese and gets out of breath walking up the stairs? Step count as a measure of overall daily "exercise" is worse than useless.

> Step count as a measure of overall daily "exercise" is worse than useless.

On the one hand, yes I've been saying this since the step counters first came out with high levels of disdain.

On the other hand relative step count (ie "I now go on more walks so I beat my own original levels of activity") is not entirely useless and probably has some non-zero value?

But, like, rewarding someone more for slowly strolling for 2000 steps vs running 1500 (which probably covers a similar distance and is waaaaaay better for cardio vascular fitness) seems like a terrible plan

This is exactly the point I brought up the other day when my friend sent me a "FitBit Weekend Warrior Challenge". It counted steps only, so where I would've normally jogged, I was being encouraged to walk, having a directly negative effect on my weight loss and fitness.

> On the other hand relative step count (ie "I now go on more walks so I beat my own original levels of activity") is not entirely useless and probably has some non-zero value?

Relative step count is good if your only exercise is walking (or walking-like.)

OTOH, I've observed that my step count tends to go down as actual heavy exercise (weightlifting, etc.) goes up, so even relative step count isn't a good measure of overall activity.

> But, like, rewarding someone more for slowly strolling for 2000 steps vs running 1500 (which probably covers a similar distance and is waaaaaay better for cardio vascular fitness)

Its probably better for leg strength, but fitness walking (not casual walking), I suspect, is better for cardiovascular fitness, step-for-step, than running, since you get into a reasonably good exercising heart range for a longer time.

But, again, step counting alone doesn't distinguish fitness walking from casual walking any more than walking from running.

Paraphrasing Nietzsche here:

"There are horrible [products] which, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all."

Being thin and reasonably healthy isn't difficult...the rest of the developed world does it without much thought. Only in America do we think the solution to an overengineered food and fitness system is more engineering.

To be pair, our corporations have had free reign to run massive propaganda campaigns to teach them the wrong ways to stay healthy. They even manipulated the USDA food guidelines to get people to buy more corn and bread.

Fitness isn't complicated, but in America we want more: "fitness while eating whatever we want and filling every free moment with entertainment".

Most other developed countries are getting fatter and less fit. The UK isn't far behind America and others are catching up.

"More fit" in this article seems to exclusively mean "weigh less." I would argue that that is a very superficial definition of fitness.

> "...the primary reason to wear the devices isn’t to lose weight — it’s to be more active. But even in this respect, it didn’t work nearly as well as we might hope. In the IDEA trial, those who employed the technology were no more physically active than those who didn’t. They also weren’t more fit."

I wear Crossfit socks inside my Karate Kimono, and this won't turn me into a Strength/Fighting machine? Want my money back!

Seriously though, some of these article titles lately ...

While it's not worth it for me to pay $30 for the full paper of the main trial ('IDEA') cited, from the abstract I wonder about the conclusions drawn.

* What if the specific content of the full bundle of interventions – including a certain kind counseling & low-calorie diet – actually serves to make the tracker seem relatively less-important? (It might be the case that someone given just a tracker would focus on it, while those with the other interventions – all participants – would be more likely to view it as superfluous.)

* What if those losing less weight are nonetheless more satisfied with their progress, perhaps because they've gained in other ways? (What if they've lost less weight because they've gained muscle weight? There's no hint whether this was measured.)

* It's not clear how the "…those who employed the technology were no more physically active than those who didn’t… {t]hey also weren’t more fit" conclusion was drawn. Self reports? (How do you know someone's true activity without a dedicated tracker?)

* What specific tracker & software was used? Results could be very sensitive to UX issues – something minimal & academic might be hard-to-use and easy-to-ignore compared to (say) popular commercial smartphone apps. They only mention a 'website', not an 'app', in their abstract. (I would not often visit a website to check my activity or check my diet, but I view my wrist-worn Fitbit device, and its app interface, a dozen or more times a day.)

I suspect that to get a clearer reading of what just-a-tracker might do, I'd prefer a minimal focused study, along the lines of:

* every participant is asked their weight-loss goal, then sent a questionnaire once each week to self-report progress

* some participants are also given a commercial tracker, and their weekly questionnaire also asks if they're using it

* at the end, total progress is evaluated (and automated activity-tracker usage stats collected)

That could disentangle the other-interventions and maybe-not-state-of-the-art academic interface from the results.

Funny, I was sure carrying around alll that extra weight on my wrist was sure to make me fitter.

Perhaps the devices led folks to set achievable goals. A good idea, unless its "10% more exercise this week". It could make you less ambitious. Without the device, you might drive yourself to more activity because you don't really know if you're doing more or less than last week. So you go over to make sure.

Just another case of "all the gear, no idea".

It's like dashboard cargo-culting. People love putting shit ton of graphs and looking at curves going up and down, but that's the wrong focus. Graphs are meant to help you answer questions. If you don't know the questions, they become only works of computational art.

Speak for yourself :) It helped me a lot. Like the someone said, it is like a watch, allows you to track. Next step is manage.

Oh. What a surprise.

Let's face it, if wearable fitness devices told you the complete truth, you'll stop wearing them.

I don't understand. What truth could they report that would cause them to be taken off?

" You are fat and unhealthy. If you don't change your ways, you will die soon. "

The real problem is that the honest message, "if you don't change your ways, you will have more aches, pains and health issues and are statistically likely to die a few years sooner" wouldn't be nearly as impactful.

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