Fitbit? or is it Fatbit?

[altivo]

Husband got a new Fitbit wristband/smartwatch with more features, and gave me his old one ("Inspire HR" model) to play with. He is a big enthusiast, but I think it's just because the thing produces all kinds of graphics and charts and he has a thing about those.

So I've been wearing this one for about three weeks now, and it has accumulated enough data on my activities, heart rate, and sleep cycles to start making unwanted suggestions. Like that I should sleep more hours a day, because that's the norm. Not because it sees any problems caused by my sleep habits (6 or 7 hours a day) but because "most people your age sleep more." Phooey on that.

The sleep analysis is interesting. I have no idea how accurate it is, but like so many tech things, it seems to believe it is master of everything and I'm just stupid. It divides my sleep time into categories: deep, light, REM, and awake. I get counts of time and charts showing the periods in different colors. Sometimes if I'm awake and reading, it thinks that is REM sleep. If the dog squirms around on the bed, it thinks I'm awake and restless. If I were to sleepwalk, I'm sure it would think I was awake and active.

Much more amusing, though, is the calories counted. Now I'm not bothering to tell it what or how much I eat, though that is possible by going through the associated phone app. By default, however, it looks at my activity levels ("steps," whatever it thinks those are; heart rate changes; breathing rates; and sleep cycle) and calculates how many calories I am "burning" every hour. I did supply it with my age, weight, gender and height figures and I assume those go into the calculation.

Now I have counted calories carefully over several months a couple of years ago. I know what my typical food consumption is. I do pretty well at controlling that, and I don't splurge on sugars, other carbs, or fatty stuff. Since that calorie-conscious diet two years back (I lost 40 pounds) my weight has been stable, varying only by a pound or so up and down. Let me tell you, if I were consuming the number of calories Fitbit thinks I'm burning, I would be gaining weight like crazy. Fortunately, I'm not doing that. It does keep telling me that I should be losing 0.1 pounds each day, though how it knows that without any information on what I actually ate is quite a mystery.

The thing also has an irritating habit of buzzing on my wrist to tell me I need x number of additional steps for the current hour in order to meet its expected minimum activity levels. I suppose that might be good advice if I've been sitting still and writing, but often it just seems absurd. "Quick, you need 87 more steps to reach 250 for this hour." Or worse, at bedtime, "Get 675 more steps to meet your daily quota." Sorry, no. Since it counts steps based on arm movement, playing the piano runs up the step counter rapidly. Likewise, walking with my left hand in my pocket is "silent stepping" that doesn't get counted.

I'm still wearing it to see whether it adjusts its recommendations based on what it measures and the results, as I report my weight once a week. I can't see any changes yet.

Also, there's a contradiction between the wristband and the app on what constitutes "cardio" exercise. I can convince both that I have done some any time I move quickly doing barn chores, or do anything that involves lifting hay bales or feed sacks (most days there's some of that.) But invariably, the two record and report different numbers of minutes of cardio for the day, sometimes differing by as much as a factor of ten.

For additional curiosity, since AARP recommends the Google "Fit" app, I am running that concurrently. The Google app uses only my inputs and what it measures as "steps" using the sensors in my Motorola phone. The step counts are fairly close between Google and Fitbit, surprisingly, with Google counting a bit lower because sometimes I leave the phone on a table and forget to take it with me. Google counts something called "heart points" instead of "cardio" and I rarely get any of those. I assume they are calculated just based on how many steps I get and how fast I am stepping.

Anyway, it's all very amusing, and they make a lot of pretty colored charts filled with what I am convinced is spurious data.

Comments

[ranunculus]

Three or four years ago I purchased a Fitbit. Over time the "features" got turned off until only the step counter was on. As you say the step counter is wildly inaccurate. It doesn't know what a shovel is and it sure doesn't know what a post pounder is, or a digging bar.... When I was still working it used to count every time I lifted a light onto the pipe, but it was still kind of useful, a day with 30K steps was still a long day of walking!
In August, after breaking yet another wristband, I took my Fitbit off and began using the clock on my phone which is perfectly adequate. It was a bit of a learning curve, I've worn a watch my whole life; but no more frustration with the Fitbit!

[altivo]

Today's watches, if you are a cheap bastard like I am, seem to last about a year. When it's time to change the battery, they stop running and never run again. I do have my father's gold watch that General Motors gave him on his 35th (I think it was) year working for them. That's an old fashioned mechanical self-winder. The self-winder doesn't keep it running, but if I remember to wind it manually once a day it still keeps time. I actually prefer a pocket watch, but those are all battery operated too and act just like the cheap wrist watches. I eventually got a mechanical one (made in China, of course) from EBay and it works pretty well. I agree that a cell phone does the job and is probably more accurate, but pulling that out to check the time is not very surreptitious, and I often want to see the clock time without being obvious about it. For that purpose, the Fitbit is pretty decent, and especially so since it lights up at a flick of the wrist without any other obvious moves.

The problem with this Fitbit is the kooky charging method. A special cable with tiny spring loaded pins that are supposed to make contact with pads on the back of the wristband, and be held in place by a magnet in the cable end while charging? Who dreamed that nonsense up? Whoever it was, I'd love to push them into a cold pond. It takes five minutes of fiddling to get the thing situated so it will charge uninterrupted.

[ranunculus]

I gave up on cheap watches too, and agree that the Fitbit is easy to see - well, some of them are. The last one was small and, in addition to the funky charging (Totally agree with you) it had a "feature" that dimmed the display until it was illegible. Supposedly it only did that if you set it that way, but my last one re-set itself to 'dim" mode every day. Who thought THAT was a good idea?

[theradicalchild]

My Apple Watch has definitely allowed me to keep in shape easier. I haven't really felt the need to upgrade it.

[altivo]

Even aside from price, I have a deep prejudice against all things Apple. It stems from having been forced to use a Macintosh computer when I was a professional technical writer. Five years of that (well, three, I guess, because I got promoted to quality control engineer eventually) was enough to really turn me against the Jobs empire. Mind, I was converted to UNIX by the time I finished working there. I'm almost as unaccepting of Microsoft stuff.

I should admit here that I'm a command line kinda guy. I was in IT starting back when IBM mainframes ran MVS 3.1 or DOS/E and we used line editors to write code. GUI stuff bugs me, and always seems incredibly cumbersome.

[ranunculus]

I'm just thankful that Linux distributions are end user friendly with working GUI these days. I've been running Mandriva (or it's parent Mandrake for 20 years - but I don't code. I mirror image things part of the time and have specific memory issues. Yes that means sometimes things are broken, but I really hate Windows and Apple is even worse. When I started out on a TRS-80 in um, 1985(?) I did a little command line stuff, but I had to write the steps down so they would be correct.

[altivo]

I generally use Linux Mint. I don't think I've ever looked at Mandriva. On my DEC Alpha system I use Debian or Gentoo because they are the only ones left that have support for the DEC processors. Even then, Debian is frozen now and I'm not sure about Gentoo. The Alpha will run OpenVMS of course, but support and hobbyist licenses for that are now frozen too. Shame, because those 128 bit processors are still perfectly usable.

The Amiga (mine has a 68030 processor) there was a version of Linux available, but that's probably buried in the past as well.

[theradicalchild]

I got a bit of an old-school programming education at community college myself, starting in 2002, although I think they've since modernized.

[altivo]

Hee! I started work at Time Inc. in Chicago back in 1982. They trained me in house to code IBM assembly language and JCL, and sent me to work in their market research division that sold market statistics to grocery store chains. I was one of two people who maintained the compiler for their own home grown language SLAM. It was all very interesting, but a bit scary at first. Making a bad mistake could leave hundreds of clerks sitting on their hands until it was fixed. I was lucky, though, and never made that kind of mistake while I was there.

[theradicalchild]

There were a few times where programs I ran (FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG), got into infinite loops, and we had to call our community college's IT dept. to manually stop them from continuously printing through the mainframe computers.

[altivo]

I can't remember ever getting an infinite loop in an actual batch program. Certainly should be possible, but I think the IBM environments were set to detect such a thing and abort it or put it on hold and notify the operator's console. From there the operator could abort it (and give the person responsible a good chewing out as well.)

The last few years at Time, I was a systems specialist, which meant among other things that I had operator authority even in TSO commands. One has to be careful with that. It's almost like running your interactive UNIX session under the root account (anything is allowed, though you do get warned about a few things, like accidentally trying to erase the entire system disk drive.) We used to occasionally run a job to do something, like repair or reinitialize a disk drive on the mainframe, that would prompt the console operators for permission. We were supposed to warn them in advance, give them the job id, and tell them it was OK to approve it. A colleague (not me, thanks to Epona) put in such a job and then realized he had an error in the JCL so it would erase the wrong disk drive. Figured he could wait for the operator prompt to come up, and respond "CANCEL" to it himself, since the console guys would call him on it anyway. They didn't call. He got the notice that the job had finished normally. What? Called the console, and they said "Oh, yeah, we saw that, but we knew it was you so we authorized it anyway to save time." Oops. Fortunately there was a backup of the drive from just the night before and it could be restored. ;P

[hrrunka]

I remember an occasion while I was at Uni when one of the Comp.Sci. (or whatever they called it back then) students put together a tiny little IBM assember program that attached itself. Brought the mainframe crashing down, and it was a day or three before students were let near it again.

I learned FORTRAN IV on that mainframe (mostly using punched cards and the occasional bit of paper tape), and BASIC on a Nascom 2. Various flavours of Fortran, Basic and assorted assemblers filled the first decade or so of my employment, until the Unix world bit the company in the early nineties.

[altivo]

Oh, yeah, I had my first contact with computers when I took a FORTRAN class in my sophomore year. The university had Control Data Corp. computers for that. (I'm old, obviously.)

[hrrunka]

A colleage I worked with up 'til the early nineties had started his commercial computer career working on the Leo 1. It was rumoured that he had previous non-commercial computing experience working at Bletchley Park...

[moonhare]

At least it isn’t zapping you to get your compliance!

[altivo]

Not yet, anyway.