Fitbit – Your Personal Healthwatch
Imagine a pocket-sized piece of technology that could tell you the number of calories burned, steps taken, miles walked, quality of sleep and intensity of exercise you’ve had all day. That’s pretty much what the Fitbit Tracker is; a tiny, wireless device you can use to record your fitness. A stack of algorithms knitted tightly around accelerometer motion sensors and squashed into an attractive, miniature package make the nifty gadget that gathers data about your daily activity and uploads them onto a personal site. Alternatively, you can view the data straight from the Fitbit Tracker itself. The blue OLED display is easy to read and it also includes a picture which shows your overall activity level. So even glancing at the device will let you know when to quicken your step.
Tests have shown the Tracker to be over 95% accurate when recording data about your daily activities. It is not going to be as precise when you’re doing things like cycling and it certainly wasn’t designed use in a swimming pool. Fitbit isn’t waterproof either, although it is water-resistant and hence safe to wear on your wrist. The attached accessories are a wristband and belt holster. The duty of the Fitbit charger is quite obvious; the juice pumped into the tiny tracker is enough to make it last 10 days. Besides charging, the base station also serves as a wireless port into which the tracker dumps fitness information. You don’t need to be within range for it to work. The Fitbit records and stores detailed daily data for a week and summarised daily data for a month.
The Fitbit website is where your data finally ends up and you can make that as private or public as you wish. The synchronising software runs on Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X. The website is free to use and a great place to meet people with similar health goals. It allows you to create online groups with this people and includes a tool to ‘track’ what the fitbit device doesn’t; your weight and daily nutrition (i.e. calorie intake).
The Fitbit Tracker will be available in the summer 2009 and sell for $100 in the USA only. They will certainly be available worldwide sometime in 2010.
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June 3rd, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Interesting technology. I would especially like the quality of sleep monitor, because I don’t feel like I sleep very well. It would be cool to see if I could do things differently like laying a different way and seeing how that affects my sleep patterns. Something definitely to consider buying.
Thanks for sharing this.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Fitbit Tracker is really a fascinating device. Unfortunately , i’m living in Singapore and have to wait for it to come in the year 2010. Really looking forward to it and thanks for the detailed explanation on this device !
June 27th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Interesting piece of invention. This technology will be surely good even if its 95% accurate because most of the gluco meters and blood pressure equipments are not 100% accurate as well.
This will surely let people control their diet and track their fitness level and $100 is not even a big amount specially for people living in USA. I hope it will get here soon before 2010 or if we can import it from USA after summer
Thanks
September 27th, 2009 at 2:11 am
the long awaited FitBit is now on market for just $99. wow I just love it