How do Apple watches, FitBits, etc. accurate? Are they truly precise?
In: Technology
Depends on what you mean by accurate. There were a few studies done back in the FitBit heyday that demonstrated that phones were actually *better* at tracking steps and distance (not even including GPS data) than Fitbits. The Apple Watch basically killed all the other fitness trackers.
Tracking steps is pretty easy, and they’re pretty accurate. Tracking distance is also easy via GPS, so they’re accurate for this as well.
Tracking things like heartrate, they’re reasonably accurate. The Apple Watch does a pretty good job, and it has a shockingly good ECG function, but it will be wonky if you’re doing intervals or something and moving/sweating a lot with a very high HR. For that sort of thing the chest-band trackers are still superior.
For things like *calories,* it gets really tricky. It’s effectively making a bunch of assumptions based on your height, weight, sex, age, heartrate, and activity type. I wouldn’t really take any of the calorie estimates seriously, IME they are way overblown. If I *actually* burned 1,000 calories in 90 minutes of weightlifting, I would probably be half-passed out on the floor for 2 hours afterward.
There are ways to track calorie consumption accurately, but they generally involve peeing in a cup or breathing into a tube in a hospital.
So it really depends on what you’re trying to track.
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