I have always thought wearable technology such as the Fitbit Flex or the Jawbone up are novel yet interesting ideas. Google Glass is an idea that I believe can become something that can save people’s lives but also make them easier during day to day task. Although wearable technology is new, it’s grown so much over the course of a year. There are now dozens of companies in the market making devices that you wear on your wrist, arm, or in Glass case your head. These devices as the Flex and Up are only great to track your data, but they don’t have any recommendations to how you should be active or eat to stay healthy and fit.
The Flex and Up are great at tracking your sleep, and how many steps you take in a day. However, there is little break down to how that’s affecting you and how its going to impact your overall health. Let me give you an example of what I mean; So lets say I ran two miles yesterday, than did a leg workout. I meet my 10,000 step goal, and also worked my legs to the max. They’re sore and I am tired, so the next day I decide to not run and just go to the gym to work out my upper body. The Flex nor the Up will recognize that you did a extensive work out, it’ll just see you did not meat your walking goal that you have set.
The Jawbone Up has realized that people want to know what they are doing during the work out, so they have opened their platform up to third parties. There are apps that can analyze your sleep, and recommend how to get better sleep and transition you to better sleeping habits. And we all know when you go for a run you’ll take your smart phone with you, so Runkeeper has built features to sync your Jawbone Up data with the Runkeeper app. This will help you track your run beyond how many steps. The Runkeeper app tracks speed, distance, and amount of time taken. This data can be better used during the run, and I plan on doing a in depth review of some of the apps, and how they take advantage of the data from this device.
These devices are just to track data, and in reality they do little to help you understand what your doing every day. The data sits in the apps and you have to try and understand if your meeting goals, eating healthy, and sleeping enough. There needs to be some app that goes in, takes the data and tells users what they are doing and what they should change to stay healthy. Telling someone they had 6 hours of sleep with 3 hours of deep and 3 hours of light sleep is not helping them understand. I could wake up and feel rested still and had 1 hour of deep sleep with 5 hours of light sleep.
We need more analyzed data so we know what we are doing, and less just tracking data. Jawbone is working to get their data from users into hands of people that can use it better and help the user understand their workout and sleep habits much better. However, many people are still unsure if these wearable devices that track so much are a good idea. We have cell phones and those invade our lives enough. The question I pose to you guys is whether these devices should be more used or they are just stuck as a novel idea? Tell us your thoughts, opinions, and questions in the comments below.