How to Improve Accuracy in Health and Fitness Wearable Apps

With advancements in technology, our ability to use it for our overall health has also improved. Today, using wearable fitness trackers, you can track everything from how many steps you take in a day to how many hours you sleep at night. It may come across as just another gadget to add to your tech collection, but a fitness tracker is a really good investment for your health. 

Research has shown that wearable fitness trackers can lead to an increase in physical activity while simultaneously improving your health. So, if you are just starting your fitness journey and are looking to burn more calories than you consume or are a seasoned athlete training for your first marathon, a fitness wearable device and its app may help you meet your goals.

Although these fitness wearables are valuable tools, they can’t be 100 percent accurate in every situation. For example, when measuring complex metrics such as sleep stages or how many calories you have burned. However, the trends and patterns these wearable apps show are quite useful for improving consistency and providing a rough estimate of our health progress. 

This blog will talk about how you can get the most accurate results from your fitness wearable device for key metrics. So without any further ado, let’s dive in!

Calories Burn

Have you ever walked outside for 20 minutes, and your fitness tracker on your wrist shows 500 calories burned? Yes, that can get confusing and make you doubt all the other key health metrics it is telling you. 

It’s a sad truth that these calorie-burning estimates aren’t all that true and should only be believed as an approximation rather than the objective truth. 

But, shouldn’t they work properly? Ideally, yes and realistically, no. They rely on algorithms that cannot truly account for individual metabolic differences. So what can you do about it? Firstly, realise that calorie-burning estimates on fitness trackers are just rough estimates. These devices themselves have to rely on assumptions about the calories that you can burn while doing a certain physical activity. So, it’s normal for them to be quite a bit off by hundreds of calories or more.  In short, the number should be considered as a rough guideline for tracking the overall trend of your workouts.

Steps Counter

Yes, we have seen the step-counter apps on the App Store or the Play Store. But, sad to break your bubble, they track very wrong. The best ones to track your steps are the wrist ones. But, they also have a grey area where they will count steps when you move your arm around to brush your teeth or eat food. In reality, hip motion is more associated with taking a step than arm motion.

These wearable fitness devices give reliable step counts during walking or steady movement. But in irregular movements or slower speeds, this accuracy may be compromised. These devices also have their own apps created by a reliable wearable app development company that you can download to track your progress on your mobile phone. 

Heart Rate Monitoring

Now, heart rate monitors are supposed to be pretty accurate. But, for a precise number, you should purchase and wear one that goes around your chest instead of your wrist. That’s because chest straps use a different kind of tech from trackers worn on the finger or wrist. The chest strap ECG is the most accurate one for tracking heart rate. Wrist-worn and finger-worn options use a different technology. They use photoplethysmography (PPG), which detects blood flow changes with light, but it’s not that accurate for tracking dynamic movement. They are good for resting data or sleep activity. 

However, if you have a fitness tracker for your finger or wrist already, then make sure that it fits you properly for more accurate results. It shouldn’t be too tight that it’s pressing on your arteries, and it shouldn’t be too loose also that it loses contact with your skin during a workout. 

Sleep Tracking

Having a consistent sleep routine helps you to maintain your health and also keeps your body’s circadian rhythm in alignment. To track sleep, some people use sleep trackers, but they aren’t very accurate. Here’s why: Sleep trackers can’t really read your brainwaves to see what’s going on in your brain during sleep. They’re really just looking at your body movement and heart rate, and use that information to evaluate your sleep habits. This creates a misunderstanding as to what’s going on in your sleep. For example, you wake up in the middle of the night at 3 am, but stay still. Some sleep trackers may record that as if you’re still asleep.

For improved accuracy of a sleep tracker, you must wear it consistently. When the advanced sleep tracking models can better understand your individual sleep patterns, then they can give you more accurate insights and organized data on your sleeping patterns.

Key Takeaway

To sum up, fitness wearable apps and gear make it easy for you to count valuable metrics around your health, such as sleep, heart rate, calorie burn, step count, etc. But, for them to be accurate, you have to take some precautions also. For example, invest in a device that goes around your chest to accurately measure heart rate. For tracking how many calories you have burned during a workout or physical activity, you should know that you won’t get a correct answer for it. And, with that, you should use the number as an estimate of how you’re doing during certain workouts. Lastly, for tracking your sleep patterns, wearing the tracker on your wrist consistently is your best option.