Specifically, look out for comments that mention the durability and reliability of the wearable. One of the best ways to tell the difference is to read customer reviews. There’s a major difference between a cheap product and a quality budget pick. On the other hand, if you’re more curious about health metrics, you’ll likely want to choose a wearable that offers continuous heart rate monitoring and sleep tracking. This is especially important for swimmers, as only a few trackers are specifically designed to be accurate in the pool. If you’re primarily interested in sports metrics, make sure to choose a tracker that offers specific sports modes or functions that are relevant to your fitness routine. The most important considerations are how you plan to use a fitness tracker and which type of data you’re most interested in.įor example, some trackers are primarily designed to provide key insights on your health, such as your sleep habits and stress levels, while others are geared more toward helping you improve your athletic performance. When shopping for a fitness tracker, you’ll want to take time to consider how you plan to use it, how much you want to spend, and which features you’re willing to live without.
#Most accurate calorie tracker 2021 how to#
The end goal? By tracking our activity more accurately, wearables will be able to give us personalized insights into how to exercise or manage our weight.How to choose an inexpensive fitness tracker "So you can really understand which activities led to the energy expenditure and how intense it was," Collins tells me. Slade is also working on a smaller and lighter version that could be integrated into clothing and maybe even use a smartphone as the controller.įor these sorts of trackers viable, they'll need to be affordable and small enough to wear all day, so we can track our energy expenditure on a second-by-second basis. All of the instructions and code were made available in the hopes this will help speed up development. You can't buy this new wearable, but you can make it yourself. The research paper also encourages smartwatch engineers to use its method to improve calorie tracking effectiveness. "Maybe using an IMU in your smartwatch to get that arm motion, if you're doing a rep you could perhaps use the same modeling approach," he says. "People can't necessarily just scale the smartwatch estimates by a fixed amount to make them accurate for everyone," he says.įor now, this leg-based system only works for lower-body exercises, but he's already thinking of ways to make a version that can also take into account upper-body movement like weightlifting. Turns out the watch was underestimating my overall calorie burn during each exercise, but Slade tells me it could overestimate for someone else. You can see the rest of the calorie counts per exercise in the video on this page, but across all four workouts, the leg wearable error rate was 14% compared with 58% from the watch on my wrist. For running, the respirometry device said I burned 87 calories, the leg wearable 66 calories and the smartwatch 52 calories. The results are in - and they're surprisingĪfter gathering all the data points from each device, Slade walks me through the results. I know I'm not going to be setting any pace records with all these tools strapped to my body, but fortunately that doesn't matter - we're only tracking energy expenditure.
Once we get a baseline reading from the respirometer, I start working out. After my workouts, we'll compare results from all three devices. It costs tens of thousands of dollars and weighs about 5 pounds complete with mask and backpack, so it's not really the best tool for people to use outside the lab.įinally, I strap a smartwatch to my wrist to get its calorie estimations. This monitors the carbon dioxide I breathe out and the oxygen I breathe in to give me what Slade calls the "ground truth" reading, or my actual calorie burn. I also put on a lab-grade respirometer to measure my actual energy expenditure. It feels like I have a small smartphone strapped to my midsection and I don't even notice the wires running down my legs. You strap two stretchy bands with the IMUs on your thigh and shin, then wrap a controller and battery around your waist. Putting on Slade's system is straightforward. I'll be doing four workouts for 5 minutes each: walking, running, cycling and stair stepping.
But for the purposes of testing out this new wearable, only regular gym machines like a stair climber and exercise bike are needed. To test its accuracy for myself, I've come to Stanford University's human performance lab, filled to the brim with a range of sophisticated workout equipment including an antigravity treadmill.
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