I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my Fitbit One since 2013.

It’s cute but has limited practical value. The Fitbit cannot track my favorite activ­i­ties: yoga, kayaking and cycling. It cannot measure my most important daily activity, yoga. As a result it provides a very limited view of how I invest my time and energy in fitness activities.

It’s a fine companion for walking and hiking, but that’s about it…

A reminder to be more active

We use our Fitbits for sim­ilar rea­sons: they’re a handy reminder to be more active, climb more stairs, go for longer walks; or get better sleep. They motivate us to get out of the house, even on cloudy days.

One of my friends now walks twice as much each day, aiming for at least 10,000 steps before she stops for lunch.

Only weeks after major abdominal surgery my sister was back on Facebook, reporting her daily steps walked. Fitbit showed her the improving patterns between good days and bad days.

For me it’s like having a fit­ness con­science in my pocket — whispering that my desk-bound occupation is not healthy for extended periods of time.

Fitbit One has been helpful, but its days in my life are numbered.

Change Is in the Offing

It’s clear that the fit­ness device industry is on the verge of a big tran­si­tion, trig­gered by Apple. This will be highly disruptive for today’s incumbents like Fitbit or Jawbone.

It’s a make-or-break moment for smaller players like Fitbit. Where do they place their bets?

Apple is poised to dis­rupt the health and fit­ness market with an integrated set of capabilities: the IOS Health app, enhanced motion tracking in the new iPhone, the Apple Watch and Apple’s long-term platform strategy for HealthKit and the newly announced WatchKit.

We will see a whole ecosystem of health and well­ness apps to be centered on the Apple Watch, IOS devices and the HealthKit platform. Major players in healthcare and health insurance are already working on big applications behind the scenes.

As a warning sign for today’s fit­ness tracking incum­bents, online pun­dits are now writing about Apple’s plans to remove devices from the Apple Store if they remain incom­pat­ible with HealthKit. Fitbit is on the list of devices to be removed from inventory.

Typ­ical Apple maneuver: “You either play by our rules, or you don’t get to play the game with us in our global marketplace.”

Learning from the iPod and iTunes Store play­book, this is a defining moment for devices and suppliers that choose to remain incom­pat­ible with Apple’s platform protocols and policies…

As a high tech industry watcher (and former Apple employee), I pre­dict lots of interim con­fu­sion, device-ecosystem incompatibility and media noise. Resulting in significant con­sumer frustration until the winners take their rightful places and the ecosystem shakes out.

Apple versus Google (Again)

Most likely Apple and Google will con­tend for the lead posi­tion as the center of the solar system for health and fit­ness man­age­ment via con­sumer devices.

In the mean­time con­sumers will buy today’s devices, not real­izing they should factor in personal preferences about whose ecosystem will work best for them. Many will unknow­ingly choose a fashionable or low-cost device, only to learn that it’s incom­pat­ible with their Apple or Google devices and app stores.

Every time the tech industry goes through one of these upheavals, you see com­pe­ti­tion between two opposing philoso­phies: the “all in one” mainstream approach versus the specialists whose niche devices have been opti­mized to do a few things excep­tion­ally well.

If your fitness preferences are not mainstream, what will you do?

I find myself won­dering which alter­na­tive will win out, and which will be best for people like me.

The Apple Watch and IOS 8 devices like the new iPhone 6 are aiming to dominate the all-in-one game plan — at least for main­stream fit­ness activ­i­ties that are easy to measure. Walking, hiking, running…

What about yoga?

I’ve read nothing to suggest the new Apple devices will be well suited for yoga or kayaking. Cycling is more main­stream so it’s got a better shot at being sup­ported early on.

So that leads me to sus­pect I’ll be rel­e­gated to buying assorted spe­cialty devices, future options designed to inte­grate with HealthKit and iPhone 6.

Given my fitness lifestyle and sensibilities, I prefer a small unob­tru­sive device that inte­grates with HealthKit and sends data to my iPhone. This device needs more motion tracking intelligence than the Fitbit One offers.

Key requirements

For my ideal tracker:

• It would be small and easy to wear (or hide) during yoga classes.
• It knows about yoga poses and vinyasa flows, able to measure the practitioner’s steps or jumps, effort and energy expended.
• It would provide more accurate data about the dis­tance traveled when cycling and the rel­a­tive effort expended to cover that dis­tance (speed, hills climbed, etc.)
• It would be water­proof or include a watertight case option, for peace of mind while kayaking.
• The calorie tracker knows the dif­fer­ence between walking, hiking, run­ning or jogging.

My current options, iPhone 6 and Fitbit One, are far from meeting these require­ments.

Yoga Is Spe­cial

The Fitbit is use­less for a daily yoga practice. It’s small and easily hidden, but cannot measure yoga motions.

Ideal device for yoga

My ideal device would be capable of detecting different motions, pose sequences and posi­tions in space while practicing. Upright or inverted poses, for starters…

Surely a head­stand or shoulder stand should be tracked and assessed as more dif­fi­cult, con­suming more calo­ries, than standing upright in Moun­tain Pose. After all we expend more energy when balancing upside down on our head and hands than when standing upright in a more normal posture.

Apple Watch or iPhone — Not right for studios

Even though my iPhone 6 has decent built-in tracking capa­bil­i­ties, bringing a mobile phone into a public yoga class is a huge no-no.

If the Apple Watch makes noises for incoming phone calls, it too will be banned from studios unless watch wearers remember to silence all alarms.

Plus, there’s no good way to wear a big phone while prac­ticing yoga. You can’t strap the phone to your wrist or upper arm because it could easily get in the way of spe­cial­ized poses or inver­sions. It could smack you in the face during Down­ward Facing Dog if you hung your phone around your neck. It could easily fall from a pouch onto the floor, and pos­sibly break from the impact.

The Apple Watch looks like it’s going to be too big or obtrusive to wear to a yoga class.

Plus, it’s too flashy, too eye-catching, too desirous of calling atten­tion to itself — anti­thet­ical to yogic prin­ci­ples of non-attachment.

That’s why some­thing small that could be stowed inside a tank top would be a better option for yoginis who want to track yoga for fit­ness rea­sons without calling atten­tion to what they’re doing.

Is Yoga That Difficult?

It’s hard to under­stand why there are no yoga-savvy tracking devices today. Surely, this is an easy problem to solve, given the right math and physics applied via smart algorithms and today’s intelligent sensors.

There’s a lim­ited “vocab­u­lary” of common yoga poses, and each one is very well under­stood. Many resources have been pub­lished on the subject.

I would think it would be easy to teach the yoga motion vocab­u­lary to a tracking sensor, including pose vari­a­tions across the schools of yoga…

Some­thing Dif­ferent Is Coming, Someday

All I can pre­dict at this moment is that some­thing, rea­son­ably soon, is going to dis­lodge my Fitbit One from my fit­ness wardrobe…

If Lul­ulemon weren’t so pre­oc­cu­pied with its ongoing quality and inven­tory man­age­ment issues, I might have expected a Lulu-branded device for yoga fans. Or maybe Manduka.

In any case I look forward to the day when there are better choices for people like me to make.