Can You Trust Data from Fitbit
Everyone wants to stay fit and suffice it to say that staying fit has become a fashion in the contemporary era. But what matters the most is, in your way to stay fit are you actually able to keep track of your fitness. Various sellers have introduced different equipment which can help an individual to keep track of one’s day to day activities and how much they are keeping you fit. Sellers have introduced different types of bands which actually have certain features like counting the number of calories burnt by you in a day, number of footsteps taken by you, calorie intake, heartbeat, etc. with similar features an equipment named Fitbit comes which gives you information regarding your daily fitness activities and workout. But one question must be coming to your mind i.e. whether the data provided by Fitbit is reliable or not? So here are some directions by which you can decide whether the data provided by your Fitbit is reliable or not?
Information Gathered by Fitbit
While keeping tracking of your daily activities, Fitbit also gathers other information which may be directed not necessary for you but they can help in determining the expected behavior of a person. And in order to make an account, some of the information is mandatory and you cannot skip this. Such information includes your name, date of birth, sex, weight, height, email address, and a password. In exceptional cases, it may also ask for your telephone number. However, you may also opt to provide some other information like your biography, profile photo, and information of your country & also the community username.
In order to assist improve your personal experience or to enable particular features of this service, you may also opt to provide Fitbit with some additional information such as your logs for weight, food, water, sleep, or health tracking of female, messages or discussion board or even an alarm can be set.
Usage of the Information Accumulated
All the information garnered by Fitbit is used in order to improve the experience of the customer and to further develop and update the service. Fitbit uses the information to provide you with your dashboard tracking your activities, exercises and some other trends; so as to give you customer support and also to enable some of the community features of this Service.
For the features of Services’ community, Fitbit uses your information to assist you to find and connect with some other users and vice versa with you. For instance; the contact information of your account permits other users to add you as their friend. When the other user is having your mobile phone number or email id in their list of contact or even in friend network on a connected service, Fitbit shows that user that you are also a user of their Services.
Fitbit also offers Live Coaching Services, and with the help of the accumulated information, they connect you with their coaches, which allow you to interact with them through their Services, and help you in accomplishing your goals in order to lead a more active and healthier life. E.g. the goals that you will provide will allow you to develop an individual plan and then a set of actions in consultation with your assigned coach.
Improvisation & Personalization
They use the information to personalize and improve the Services and also to develop new ones. For example, they use the gathered information to troubleshoot and also to protect against errors, perform the analysis of data and then testing it. With the help of the information in hand, they also try to develop new features and services.
If given permission to collect precise information of your location, they use that to provide the information such as recording as to where the last workout took place or in mapping an activity.
Working Procedure
Information like your sex, age, weight, and height permits Fitbit to enhance the accuracy of your day to day exercise and statistics of activity like the distance you traveled and calories you burned. On the basis of your sleep data, they make inferences about the sleeping patterns and consequently provide you with very well customized insights in order to help you in improving your sleep. It also personalizes activity goals and exercises for you on the basis of goals previously set by you and your activity data or historical activity.
Fitbit for blood pressure can also be a good option since it works like a pedometer; it is just a bit smarter than a pedometer. Just like a pedometer, it counts your footsteps, which means that it detects the movement in your wrists in order to track steps.
In addition to this, Fitbit also has a simple heart rate sensor or PPG sensor to measure the blood pressure which detects the existence of a heartbeat. As a result, this helps Fitbit to calculate the number of the pulse which is detected on your wrist in one minute.
These 2 parameters to assess the number of calories burnt during activity and also the distance that you cover while running.
Question Regarding Accuracy
The most obvious question that may come to your mind is whether you can trust the data provided by your Fitbit or not? The answer to this question cannot be a direct yes or no. The first reason why the answer is no is that there is not even a single PPG sensor throughout the world which is 100 percent accurate to track the exact count of pulses from your wrist, particularly when you are doing work out. It would be a great help for you if you will ask Google as to how a PPG sensor works.
Secondly, you can never ever track the exact number of steps taken by you by only tracking the movements of your upper body. This device may show wrong results for e.g. if you are driving a car then that pedometer will also track those movements and count them as steps.
However, the data collected can be true but only to some extent for ex. If you are only walking and not doing any other things then it will give you good results and the same goes for calorie burning. So if you are a beginner you can rely upon the results of Fitbit but not completely.
