Do You Really Need a Fitness Tracker?
The popularity of wearables and fitness trackers made by companies like Apple, Garmin and Fitbit has resulted in a multi-billion-dollar industry that has boomed over the last several years. But are fitness trackers really helping us get healthier?
As someone who works in the digital health tech world, I often wonder if wearables are really necessary to track and improve health. I’ve owned two different wearables, an apple watch and a fitbit versa — and I got bored of each very quickly. I won’t lie, during the first week of usage I was enamoured by my stats, but after seven days the novelty wore off. Knowing my steps, how many calories I burned and what heart rate zone I was in during the day didn’t do it for me. I do realize there are many people who thrive on competition and optimized health, but as a 35 year old woman who is fairly active, I just saw these devices as a clunky wrist decoration that didn’t provide any additional information about my actions that I didn’t inherently already know. I also thought they looked unnaturally large on my small wrist.
It’s up to each individual whether or not they believe that owning a fitness tracker may motivate them to embrace a healthier lifestyle, but a few facts and a candid discussion about fitness tracking limitations are important to keep in mind.
Disappointing Retention Rates
Despite their high sales numbers, the sad reality of a fitness trackers life is that it’s more likely than not to end up forgotten in the back of a sock drawer, or in my case — returned to Amazon. About a third of consumers stop wearing their fitness trackers after six months of use. After a year, that number is up to nearly fifty percent.
More Numbers, Less Substance
What about those who do stick with their trackers? While fitness trackers may be a good nudge for some by encouraging more regular exercise, their statistics aren’t going to provide the health information consumers really need.
The number of steps taken each day or the number of calories burned may be a good chance for fitness tracker enthusiasts to feel great about their accomplishments, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, when people begin to assume that these numbers make them healthy, that’s where they’re barking up the wrong tree. Fitness trackers only measure activity, not health.
The Perfect Metric
The fact is that some health metrics matter more than others, and I won’t argue that I’m not biased, but biological age/Internal Age is one of the most beneficial measurements out there.
For one, tracking your biological age doesn’t require you to wear anything, and actually provides you with information on how your body is doing internally, not what actions the body is doing externally.
Biological age isn’t the same as chronological age. Rather than counting age in years, biological age is determined by an individual’s overall health and is a much more accurate measure of wellness and life expectancy. One way that biological age can be assessed is with aortic stiffness, the stiffness of the body’s largest blood vessel that lays directly in front of the spine.
Aortic stiffness has been proven by scientists as an indicator of risk of disease and provides an overview of total health. Cardiovascular disease, dementia, and overall risk of death have all been associated with an increase in aortic stiffness. Luckily, there’s good news, Aortic stiffness is reversible, and that’s where the motivation to measure it comes in.
Determining Biological Age
My team and I developed iHeart Internal Age, which is one way to calculate and track Internal Age™. iHeart is a fingertip device and app combination, which makes it possible for people passionate about their wellness to measure their aortic stiffness and biological age anytime and anywhere. The test takes only thirty seconds with immediate bio-feedback and the ability to take steps to improve and decrease Internal Age. The best part is iHeart doesn’t need to be worn constantly in order to provide accurate information.
Instead of only tracking activity levels, the iHeart Internal Age allows users to see how their activity is affecting their overall health. By monitoring aortic stiffness and biological age, fitness enthusiasts and couch-lovers alike can all work towards making more positive lifestyle choices. These interventions will lead to quick changes in biological age, and what could possibly be more rewarding than that?
I personally have learned a lot about my body since I started using iHeart. I know that things like coffee, stress, sleeping or laying down for too long increase my Internal Age. Many exercises are great for my Internal Age but running does nothing for me. Green tea, Lagree fitness, pilates, yoga, and snowboarding all decrease my internal age quite quickly. I also learned that getting hit by a car walking across the street increases my internal age to 85 years old (still working my way down from that bad boy a few years back).
There are some other pretty cool ways to track your biological age out there, like Inside Tracker, a blood test that ranges from $299-$589 USD which measures biomarkers in the blood and provides an app which helps you get healthier, a little too rich for my blood (pun intended). Teloyears is a DNA test which measures the length of the telomeres of your DNA to provide your cellular age. The Teloyears test costs $199/test and should be done four times per year.
Who knows, in the future I may be swayed by a wearable that is hardly noticeable on the body and provides more metrics that matter like biological age, aortic stiffness, and blood pressure — but until then, I am quite content using my iHeart to track my internal health and keep my Internal Age lower than my actual age.
What do you think?
