Cardio fitness notifications are available today on Apple Watch
apple.com
apple.com
A couple things I predict are coming in the not too distant future:
- Continuous feedback and monitoring of blood nutrition and glucose levels.
- Continuous feedback of mood - A real life mood ring, if you will.
- Mood data being correlated with your real life activity, guiding you towards things that make you genuinely happy and away from "empty calories" (Like mindlessly scrolling).
Is this currently possible without drawing blood? I know little about stuff in this area, but it does seem super useful if a watch was able to do stuff like this especially.
I expect that Apple and others are heavily invested in cracking glucose monitoring on a watch like this. That unlocks a lot of possibilities for diabetics and non-diabetics alike.
Levels is probably the closest thing to this right now: https://www.levelshealth.com/ - There are other continuous glucose monitors, but the "smart" integrations with fitness tracking, etc. seem novel to me.
So I doubt they will get far from that any time soon. The first company that can do it without puncturing the skin is going to have one helluva a market. How that is done, if that can be done, is still to be seen. Perhaps there is some other measurement not yet considered which can offer numbers.
https://sciencebeta.com/transdermal-glucose-measurement-patc...
That's very black mirror.
Also, didn't facebook get busted basically manipulating feeds to see how they affect people emotionally?
Trust but verify
They were doing A/B tests and were tracking sentiment. So what? How is that different than running an A/B test and tracking any other dimension?
People were asking questions like "how many people died because facebook was manipulating their emotions?". What? Why can't we say that about any change ever? It seemed to only matter to people when they started looking at sentiment.
I still disagree, though. It seems like the only logical way to get out of your thought process would be to create software and then never update or change anything. Either that or have every user sign a waiver saying that the product could change in the future and that might impact them psychologically.
After all, why is it different when you're making a change without A/B testing it? Surely every change has some hypothesis attached to it. Does it only matter to you when developers observe the metrics changing?
This is a false choice. There are multiple ways you can ethically approach improving software, such as:
- user interviews
- A/B testing with informed consent
- user testing (directly observing the user while they use the software)
- focus groups
- feedback forms
- crash/error logging
There are probably more, but the theme among all of them is user consent. The ethical implications of using engagement metrics to drive software development is well-worn territory at this point, especially with respect to social media, and I don’t understand why the software industry seems to get a pass when others don’t.
Maybe we should do studies where subjects are consenting to it...
if the user can tell that something changes because of a new features/changelog that explains it (or lists it for more trivial changes), again, seems different.
I would be open to discussion on how it's the same, or how it's unethical, though
I could use some feedback about my sleep. Other than that though it sounds like a real nag.
And there is another axis of high to low feedback in the sense of abstract (happiness) to concrete (heartrate).
I believe you might be conflating these two axes, but you made me think about it and I think it's very interesting to consider.
I think real-time continuous blood oxygen would be another one.
I see absolutely no benefit in the pulox feature on my garmin watch.
No, just dark in the beginning, the middle, and the end.
There's a current TikTok meme which approximates to: people linking Wii Fit calling them obese on a daily basis to their disordered eating and disordered relationship with exercise.
It's not sure that notifying people that they have low cardio health will have any meaningful benefit to them.
I usually charge in the morning when I'm getting ready / showering and that's usually enough to last the day.
There are some sports-specific watches that have long battery life, but then you can’t do all the things you can with an Apple Watch, a list of which is evolving annually with new apps, features, complications, etc.
It depends on what you want! Like the other commenter, I charge mine daily when having coffee in the morning and it never gets below about 40%.
Mobile phones are completely different. Since their introduction, they have never had good battery life. The most fully-featured phones have always had batteries that lasted much less than a week. It is true that there are now feature phones that can last a long time, but these are essentially a different product than smartphones.
The fact that the OP does not want to charge his watch every night or two does not mean he is unwilling to charge anything that frequently. It just means that when it comes to watches, long battery life is a core feature.
And as a bonus it also comes with the basic 'smart' features you'd expect such as phone notifications, music and NFC payment.
The Garmin ones also look much better in my opinion.
Sadly, Garmin is still better than many of the alternatives. But, Wahoo recently got into the watch game (and their bicycle computers drink Garmin's milkshake) and I suspect they'll soon be on par or ahead in that market segment.
I've had mine on since yesterday evening and still have 60% battery, so it won't take long to top it up later.
EDIT: though you might not be wrong: https://sites.udel.edu/coe-engex/2019/03/16/how-accurate-is-.... Summary: Garmin's algorithm from Firstbeat is pretty darned accurate.
Also, I know it's definitely greater than the Watch estimate. With a below average cardio I can't bike the distance or climb I do on average. I did 3 metric centuries last year (with climbs over 4000ft each), for example.
https://www.firstbeat.com/en/science-and-physiology/fitness-...
Anyhoo, if it gives folks an accurate and understandable view into their health, I'm all for it.
Edit: More relevant to the topic at hand, it tracks HR and estimates VO2 max for all my activities. IDK if Apple has made a sufficiently advanced update to what the rest of the market provides?
Apple Watch showed 6+ km for the same distance. Maybe it seems a deviation that is so small that it is insignificant, but for me it is not. I’m fighting hard for each small performance increase, this equals to a few weeks of hard work which are ignored (I’m expecting this to be unreliable in both ways, up or down).
Other major 2020 new feature that I’ve tried is the blood oxygen measuring tool. I was getting different results with up to 4-5% variation between consecutive measures. You can say that it’s user error, but whatever, if it only works when planets align maybe this is a feature that is not ready. I did not get this from my cheap chinese monitor.
In the end I’ve decided to return it. It is an awesome smart watch, but a lousy sport watch for my very own needs. I’m sure other people have different experience with it, but mine wasn’t good.
edit: regarding music, I could already do that with my Garmin 645. It syncs with Spotify playlists.
I really like using it for runs but I haven't used a Garmin so I can't compare. Seems to work well but I keep my phone on me as well. I've tried going without my phone and using Pandora but it eats up the battery really badly. I don't think you could run for more than an hour or two with everything going. (I have a series 5)
I also use it with Things for checking off todo items, siri very occasionally, sometimes answering quick phone calls, and as a quick way to ping my phone if I can't find it in the couch cushions. These are all pretty minor things but moderately improve my life.
All told it would be a mediocre product I might not even bother to charge and wear every day. That unlocking my computer though is the one thing it does I find helps my life a ton.
Or do there exist actual people with really low VO2Max measurements that need to be told by their watch that they're out of shape, rather than letting huffing and wheezing up two flights of stairs being their guide? IOW, is this feature going to tell anyone, in shape or not, something they don't already know?
Thing is, I hate to poo-poo what can be a useful feature. I look at it from time-to-time (VO2Max has been there for a couple of years(?), the notifications are new). Went in literally Christmas Day last year for surgery, the feature has been useful for measuring the road to recovery as I dragged my VO2Max out of the basement of sitting on my butt for a few months. But I suppose that if one is out of shape, it will be encouraging to watch the number go up. I just question the usefulness of notifications.
I exercise regularly and I’ve never found these devices useful for fitness at all. All of these devices focus on cardio type activities. Probably great if you like running or swimming or biking. But most people completely ignore building muscle which is arguably more important for generally fitness than even more running.
The only thing I think they’re useful for is people who would otherwise do nothing. Gives them a reminder to go for a walk.
Source: media images from Apple's website (ZIP file download): https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/watch/standard...
December is trending down.
is this accurate?