Fitbit

From Calliespedia

I discovered this bit of gadgetry through Wired Magazine.

The Fitbit accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality. The Fitbit contains a 3D motion sensor like the one found in the Nintendo Wii. The Fitbit tracks your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities.

You can wear the Fitbit on your waist, in your pocket or on undergarments. At night, you can wear the Fitbit clipped to the included wristband in order to track your sleep. Anytime you walk by the included wireless base station, data from your Fitbit is silently uploaded in the background to Fitbit.com

Manufacturer Information

Fitbit

Website

http://www.fitbit.com

Owner's Manual

Purchase History

Purchased From

fitbit.com

Purchase Date

January 11, 2010

Features

Sleep Tracking

When you get into bed, you slide the Fitbit Tracker onto a wristband that is provided with the Tracker. As you fall in and out of sleep, the Fitbit tracks the movements that your body makes and can tell you how long it took you to fall asleep, how many times you woke up throughout the night and the actual time you were asleep vs the time you were in bed.

Activity Tracking

My Fitbit Activity Level on the First Day

Calories Burned Calculation

When nothing much is logged, we try to guess how many calories you have burned if you were sedentary. (Sedentary means you got out of bed, got dressed, went to your day job, came home and did nothing much more than walk to your car.) Once you start logging activities, we assume that you know best and we stop estimating; we use the data you provided. If you only log a small portion of your activity, we'll be missing a lot.

For steps, we convert the steps to an estimated distance, then assume they were taken while walking 2.5 mph. We do the distance estimate by computing stride length using the stride provided if you entered one. Otherwise we make a guess based on your gender and height. Walking at 2.5 mph means you will be burning calories at a rate of 3 METs. This means your calories will get burnt at 3 times your BMR (Base Metabolic Rate). So in the example above 11,000 steps is a bit over 2 hours for an average woman who, according to government data, is 5'4". To figure out how many calories you burn during this period, divide your BMR by 24 hours. Then multiply by 3 for the METs and again by 2 for the number of hours. This will give you the number of calories you burned during this period including your BMR. Thus to get your total calorie burn you would do BMR - BMR*time/24 + calories computed. You have to subtract the BMR so you don't double count. (Sorry if this sounds a bit confusing. We like letting the computer take care of the math since it tends to be good at it.)

If you log your activity, you should probably also log 8 hours of working at a desk (assuming that is appropriate) and 1 hour or so of house work (cooking dinner burns calories) to get a better picture of how many calories you are actually burning.

Active Score

The Active Score captures how active you were compared to if you were completely sedentary all day. Your score will be 0 if you were sedentary, and typically a 3-digit number if you were active.

You may prefer the Active Score over Calories Burned, because the Active Score just captures your level of activity and is not dependent on your height and weight, as calories burned is.

For those who understand what a MET (Metabolic Equivalent) is, the Active Score is a rough translation of your average METs for the day (METs = Active Score * .001 + 1).

Caloric Activity Tracking

My Fitbit Calorie Count on the First Day

Wireless Background Data Uploading

The Fitbit is wireless and ships with its own base station. In order for the wireless functionality to work you will need to install a tiny piece of syncing software. This software will run on Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

The Fitbit can record detailed daily data (minute by minute calorie burn and sleep data) for 7 days and summarized daily data (daily steps, calories and distance) for 30 days. Once the Fitbit is within range, it will automatically upload any stored data that it has recorded.

Accuracy

Calorie data from the Tracker is very similar to those from energy expenditure measurement devices used in clinical research. The Tracker will give you a good sense of how your activity levels change from day to day.

The Tracker is also one of the most accurate pedometers. We've tuned the accuracy of the Fitbit step counting functionality over hundreds of tests with multiple different body types. For most wearers, the Fitbit should be roughly 95-97% accurate for step counting. We spent a lot of time ensuring that this accuracy is achieved even when you wear the Fitbit loosely in your pocket.

Sleep data from the Tracker correlates very strongly with results from polysomnograms found in sleep labs.

The Fitbit is optimized for walking, running and general household/lifestyle activities and gives you a good general 24 hour picture of your day. It's not going to be that accurate for things like biking, but the website will allow you to manually log activities, so that an estimated calorie burn for your biking can be included in your daily totals. If you are only doing the biking for an hour or so a day, the Fitbit will give you a good overview of your activities for the other 23 hours. The Fitbit is really for people to get a general sense of their day and get motivation from improvements in their general day to day trends.

Warranty

Ninety (90) days

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