Fitbit – I don't get it, please explain it to me | Hacker News Reader

Fitbit – I don't get it, please explain it to me

6 pointsSQL221911 comments

My wife has one, and I looked at the dashboard. I get that it tracks all your activity and sleep, but I'm not convinced that it has long term appeal. If you think otherwise, fire away.

View on HN

Gamification aside, the benefit that I see is that there's a clear, quantifiable metric for how active I've been on any given day. Simply setting a goal for myself to "be more active" without some way to quantify it won't yield any results because I'll essentially lie to myself and say "Yeah, I got enough exercise today" without knowing if that's actually true. With a fitbit (or similar), I can say "Yes, I got at least 10,000 steps today" (or, "No, I didn't, I'll go for a walk.")

This. And besides this, the trend of corporate wellness programs is booming, and a large portion of these is quantifying the activity levels of participant employees. Wearables like Fitbits make this trivial (as do API hooks into services provided by Garmin/Polar/Suunto/etc). In these cases, there's a financial interest for employees to use and like their activity tracker.

Look at it like a computer game. You do things and you get points. You can then use those points to 'unlock' certain achievements, beat your old high score or try to beat your friends score.

Some people like turning things into games as a mechanism to achieve certain goals.

Like dagw said it gamifies health. This makes a big difference for some people.

For me I use it more for convenience. There is good evidence that logging your behaviour promotes healthy behaviour. With fitbit I can log my food intake and it will automatically log my activity and weight. In the past I would have logged weight manually in an excel spreadsheet and probably just not tracked activity as closely.

Keeping track of your health is a life-long thing, so I would say it definitely has long-term appeal. For example, to lose weight, you must burn more calories than you eat. But once you get to your target weight, and you want to maintain it, you must make sure to keep them around the same level everyday.

Being able to enter your meals from a shared database makes this process so much smoother, and having a rough idea of how many calories you've burnt so far lets you make smarter choices about food.

Also, one of the things that the Surge model can do is track your runs via GPS. This is awesome. At first it was the only reason why I even got it, but I think the whole feature set is really helpful toward reaching your fitness/health goals.

You are correct. It has no long time appeal! It is interesting enough at the start but quickly gets boring because of its uselesnes. Especially for the average person. I can see how bringing fitnes awarenes into the minds of people again is good. But if youre not an active person you will not use it and if you are you will not need it. Gathering Information off your activitys in General can be usefull fore several things but you will not need to know if you have walkt 100 steps more or fewer then last week.

I wonder how well the secondary market could be used to gauge the long term appeal. Would people sell it because they stop using it or it is like those skinny jeans you keep because one day you will use it again?

I will say that it was neat and then lost interest, but later once I had some "fitbit friends" the gamification went up a major notch as has the stickiness.

But within a few years either FitBit bands will turn into watches or users will replace their FitBit with a watch. So from the FIT perspective it hardly seems like a stable investment especially at the current market cap.

I'd add that it matters which model you get - the HR and the Surge are the only ones worth looking at IMHO, as they monitor heart rate while the others don't.

Seeing the data from my workouts and activity, even if not 100% accurate, helps me quantify the work I put in and the results I get. Removing some of the abstraction and seeing the numbers makes the hard work more rewarding.

Gamification is a plus, however from my point of view, its just nice to be able to get some data on activity levels and sleep. When it comes to Fitbit -I 'feel' that it is too expensive. cost vs reward is not right.

I use a Xiaomi MiBand, the battery lasts for 30+ days and it is cheap. Just wear it and forget it kinda.

I use Fitbit for a while and it motivates me to move more. Engage in challenges with your friends and that will make it more appealing and engaging.

I think otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com