FitBit Frustrations

To my amuse­ment Fit­Bit awarded me the India badge today. I’d earned it by walk­ing enough steps to equate to 1997 miles — the length of India.

They make me smile but I’ve learned to dis­count FitBit’s attaboy awards because they’re gen­er­ally mean­ing­less.

Over the past two years I’ve learned that the sen­sor on my Fit­Bit One is quite inac­cu­rate, at least for the activ­i­ties I pre­fer. It deliv­ers rel­a­tively accu­rate track­ing for a lim­ited set of activ­i­ties like walk­ing or run­ning. I believe its results when FitBit’s dash­board reports that I walked far­ther today than yes­ter­day, but don’t trust the spe­cific counts for any given day or activ­ity.

When I com­pare met­rics (steps walked) between my iPhone 6s and the Fit­Bit One for the same walk or hike, the num­bers don’t agree. I’m inclined to believe the iPhone is closer to accu­racy…

My Fit­Bit is way off for yoga, kayak­ing and bik­ing. It either mea­sures almost noth­ing at all (yoga or kayak­ing), or in the case of bik­ing, mea­sures the rev­o­lu­tions of my foot on the crank rather than the dis­tance the bike has trav­eled.

And last week I learned that my Fit­Bit One is also unable to track my steps while cross-coun­try or Nordic ski­ing.

Was it the glid­ing strides, or did the cold out­door tem­per­a­tures put the sen­sor out of com­mis­sion?

Steps tracked while XC ski­ing over the hol­i­days

Over the Christ­mas hol­i­day week I skied for sev­eral hours each day, a highly aer­o­bic activ­ity, yet my tracked results were scarcely bet­ter than my per­for­mance dur­ing a more typ­i­cal (and sadly seden­tary) work week.

Based on time and effort expended on XC ski­ing, I expected that Fit­Bit would report much bet­ter activ­ity mea­sures than my nor­mal per­for­mance for a week. Instead the daily mea­sures were lack­lus­ter, accord­ing to this chart.

Given sim­i­lar con­cerns about faulty track­ing results, my hus­band gave up on his Fit­Bit months ago.

I know enough about the tech­nol­ogy to real­ize man­u­fac­tur­ers must be will­ing to install more sen­sors, and much higher qual­ity sen­sors, before track­ing devices can pro­duce accu­rate results. An inte­gral GPS com­po­nent is prob­a­bly required too.

So I con­clude: Why spend sev­eral hun­dred dol­lars on a fash­ion ver­sion bracelet or watch style track­ing device when the fun­da­men­tal value propo­si­tion remains so flawed?

Net net: a new Fit­Bit or equiv­a­lent will not be in my device bud­get for 2016. I’m crit­i­ciz­ing Fit­Bit here, but my larger point is that fit­ness track­ing devices, as a cat­e­gory, need sub­stan­tive improve­ments in sen­sor track­ing and report­ing before they’re worth the money they cost the con­sumer.