After extensive testing of the latest fitness gadgets, I have discovered one major problem common to all of them – me.
Sticking to fitness regimes and weight-loss programmes requires a degree of rigour I seem to lack and this carried over into the discipline of having to record my activity on the new Jawbone UP and updated versions of the Fitbit widget and the BodyMedia FIT armband.
All three track sleep and physical activity, while encouraging users to record their calorie consumption, but none of them is fully automated enough to cover for the failings of forgetful me.
The Jawbone UP is the newcomer and had the best chance of the three of remaining about my person.
It is an attractive looking rubberised bracelet, with a silver-coloured button on one end and a cap at the other, coming in several sizes and colours. I managed to lose the cap within a couple of days, but that didn’t stop the UP functioning, even when I took showers with it still on.
(Jawbone ought to include free extra caps with the product, instead of selling a pack of three for $15 including shipping in its online store, as this seems to be a common problem. Jawbone is also currently addressing a problem that was reported by Gizmodo and is the subject of online complaints, with the UP dying on a number of users)
The Fitbit Ultra is the size and shape of a USB memory stick and is supposed to clip to your belt or sit in your pocket. However, I found myself changing clothes and forgetting it or misplacing it on numerous occasions. It even managed to wriggle out of an armband containing it that I was supposed to wear at night.
The BodyMedia FIT Core armband fastens securely with Velcro to your upper left arm. I tried its predecessor a year ago and found it uncomfortable on occasions. The new version is 33 per cent smaller and gave me little trouble, but I would still be reluctant to wear it over a period of months.
The Core is the most sophisticated of the three – it contains four different sensors – one to detect sweat, another for skin temperature, one for heat dissipation and an accelerometer for detecting motion.
The Fitbit Ultra has an accelerometer and has added an altimeter in this new version to give some idea of gradients you’ve climbed, while the UP has just an accelerometer. These two needed me to manually press a button on them to signal I was in “sleep mode” at night and again when I woke up in the morning – something I managed to forget to do more than once – while the BodyMedia Core can automatically sense you are going to sleep.
The UP can also be made to vibrate in a thirty-minute window the user sets – allowing it to choose the optimum time in your sleep cycle to wake you in the morning. It can also vibrate at pre-set intervals during the day to remind you to get up and get some exercise.
All three can produce graphs of light and deep sleep during the night, showing when you woke up and giving a rating of how well you slept. Similar graphs show activity during the day, coloured according to being sedentary or indulging in light or heavy physical activity. You can see the number of steps walked, distances and an estimate of calories burned.
The data are uploaded in different ways. While Jawbone is known for its Bluetooth devices, the UP uploads by removing the aforementioned cap, revealing a headphone jack that plugs into the socket on an iPhone and syncs with an app.
I liked the instant ability to see my data on the go in this way, with colourful bar charts produced of my latest activity. Tipping the phone into landscape mode changed the view to a swipeable timeline, although it was not possible to zoom in with any great detail.
The app also allows you to take photos of your meals, record how you felt after them and include them in the timeline. I often forgot to do this or did not have my iPhone at the table, or was too embarrassed to capture an unappealing and unhealthy snack. This is as close as UP comes to calorie counting, so is completely imprecise in this area.
However, while the Fitbit and BodyMedia have databases of calorie-quantified food to help you record your meals, they were no match for the concoctions I was eating and I soon tired of filling in this leg of the trifecta of health.
The other two legs – sleep and activity – were recorded in graphs in a web browser when I synced the Fitbit and Core to my home PC – the Core by attaching a USB cable and the Fitbit by just being within wireless range of a dock.
The Fitbit’s dashboard offered more expansive information and charts than the UP and awarded me badges for reaching certain goals. The BodyMedia dashboard and food database offered the most comprehensive statistics and graphs of the three.
Its rivals have more of a social element, encouraging you to share information on your progress and be inspired by friends. I found some of this as half-baked as many of my meals – I don’t have any real friends using these gadgets and don’t really want to share my progress or lack of it with strangers. I was also somewhat anti-social in failing to take on community tasks set in the Up app.
If knowing your sleep patterns is not a concern, a regular smartphone is a valid alternative to these devices – it can hold more sensors than any of them, from an accelerometer to a magnetometer, barometer and GPS. With the right apps loaded, it could prove a more convenient, cheaper and even better solution for monitoring eating and exercising.
I like the Runkeeper app for tracking both my walks, runs and bike rides – it calculates calories burned and uses Google Maps to show my routes and gradients climbed. There are also countless counting-calorie apps.
Of the three devices, I would use the Bodymedia if I was determined to achieve real fitness and weight goals – it offers the best data sets for this, although it costs more ($149 plus a monthly subscription/£270 with one-year subscription as Ki Fit in the UK). The Up ($99, £80) and Fitbit ($99, January launch and price to be announced in the UK) can be recommended as well and are both subscription-free.
They may not satisfy the growing band of “quantified-selfers” out there who track their every heartbeat, but they did help raise my awareness of how much – or rather how little – I was doing to stay healthy in mind and body.
