Experts say that while these devices help improve health, there is more to weight loss than “calories in, calories out“, since a person’s ability to lose weight can be genetic. According to the researchers, fitness trackers may also prompt unhealthy behaviors in people with anxiety disorders or obsessive-compulsive disorder and should be used with caution.
Motivate changes in health
According to the researchers, the global market for fitness trackers and smartwatches has grown tremendously, with the number of fitness trackers shipped worldwide increasing by more than 1,000% between 2014 and 2020.
As fitness trackers are becoming so widely used in society, research on their effectiveness has grown rapidly. Now was a good time to pull all this knowledge together and see if there is a general message about their usefulness as health tools.
The UniSA researchers reviewed nearly 400 studies involving some 164,000 participants worldwide who used wearables to monitor their physical activity levels. The studies involved people of any age who wore an activity tracker that included a pedometer, an accelerometer, an activity monitor, or a smartphone app that counted steps, to encourage more exercise.
Their findings indicate that these utensils encourage people to walk up to 40 minutes more each day or about 1800 more steps, and resulted in a 1kg weight loss for 5 months.
What was a pleasant surprise is how helpful they were for such a wide variety of people, including all ages, healthy people, and those living with a variety of chronic conditions. In contrast, it was not so remarkable that activity monitors produce a positive change in physical activity. They are a form of external feedback, which is known to be beneficial in motivating positive changes in health.
We can’t fool Fitbit
There are those who think that activity bracelets are not as accurate as they seem. However, it is not possible to deceive her. So for those who falter in workouts but claim they’re still in great shape, the wearable can’t be fooled.
For example, let’s imagine we are going for a run 5 times a week for 3 months, get sick and skip a month. When we start running again, a fitness tracker will show us that the heart rate increases at a much slower rate than before, that we don’t run as far or as fast as before, and that the total calorie burn is much lower.