May 20, 2013 • 44 mins
What are fitness trackers? What sort of sensors does a typical tracker contain? Do fitness trackers really help you lose weight or get fit? Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
With technology with hook stuff from how stuff dot com everything.
Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan's
Trickland and on Lauren Vocbum and we're gonna track your
activity with activity trackers. That's what we're talking about today.
(00:25):
We're talking about various devices that allow you to see
how much activity you've you've you've generated over a certain
amount of time, and sometimes it helps you figure out
how many calories you've burned or how well you've been sleeping.
We want to talk about what these devices are, what
they do, how they do it, and whether or not
they're actually effective if you want to do something like
(00:46):
lose weight or get fit. Yeah. Just I mean, you know,
not that that many people are interested in that kind
of thing, you know, Yeah, there's like maybe two right, Okay,
So the last few times I've gone to C E
S I have noticed really it was I think it
was two years ago where that it was dramatically apparent
that fitness tracking and activity tracking is a real thing.
I mean, it's it's huge, huge, booming industry. Yeah. Well,
(01:09):
I mean, you know, as as between circuitry getting smaller
and uh sinking, technology improving and the software improving, and
just all of these things have been coming together to
create these smaller, sleeker, you know, better devices that can
really help people out things that are things like interoperability
to where it can interact with computers or smartphones. Not
(01:31):
not every device does that. Let's be clear about that.
There are a lot of devices out there that have
kind of a limited use like that. Maybe they just
sink with a computer, or maybe it's just a standalone device,
but a lot of them do sync up with more
than one device. You could do it with a smartphone
application or or a computer or other things as well,
and they'll let you They'll let you up port port
(01:53):
whatever data you record into different apps, so that if,
for example, you're into this kind of thing and you
have a favorite app you can you can use that
one to crunch your numbers rather than whatever other proprietary
thing they have created. Right, Right, So this gives you
a chance to, uh, to really keep a good look,
you know, get a really good look at how much
activity you are you have throughout a given amount of time,
(02:15):
like a week or a day. So you might say,
all right, I want to set a goal for myself
and this device will help me measure up against that
goal and decide, you know, am I am I meeting
my goal? Do I need to uh to crank up
the activity? Do I need to maybe you know, do
a three mile jog in the morning in order to
hit what my goals are? Do I need to UM
(02:37):
to scale back or for for for hardcore trainers, am
I running my heart rate too hard? Yeah? Yeah, So
it all depends on what device you have, whether or
not you can actually do these things, because, like we said,
not every device does everything. In fact, depending upon what
you want, that's going to really guide your choices when
it comes to picking an activity tracker. If you're interested
(02:58):
in something like that, absolutely and is um there's a
lot of really terrific reviews out there on the internet.
We'll mentioned at least one good site to go to
later on in the podcast. Yeah, there's I came across
lots and lots of them. And it's interesting too because
you can see where the different preferences come into play,
because one reviewer might say, well, you know, X is
(03:18):
the best activity tracker because it does things this way,
and someone else will say, no, no no, no, why is
the best activity tracker because it does things in this
other way, and it's just because it appeals to that
particular person a very personal choice. Right So, so that's
one thing you can get you can walk away with
right now, is that we're not gonna at the end
of this podcast. It's not like we're gonna say the
best activity tracker is blah blah blah, because it all
(03:41):
depends on what you want to get out of it now. Frankly,
I think if you are looking at one of these things,
the thing you really want to get out of it
is is making sure that you are living a healthy lifestyle.
And most of the ones that are on the market
right now will help you do that, depending on how
you use it. It's it's not magic device that automatically
(04:01):
turns you into a fit pro athlete right now. Now.
You have to you have to have your own personal
sense of motivation about exercising first. Probably obtaining a fitness
tracker is going to be one of the steps that
you're you know, carrying out in this motivation um and
and study studies have shown um that that that just
mindfulness about this kind of thing can really help you
(04:23):
out from lots lots of different corners of health and
fitness when when you are given the power to track
your own data and to kind of take it into
your own hands like that, maybe gamify at a tiny
bit um you, it really helps you out right. There's
an expert, her name's Dina Bravada. I'm sure you ran
(04:43):
across her name several times as well, because it's all
over the place in the research on activity tracking, and
she has said that there there is a bit of
a bias that's present with activity trackers in the sense
of the people who who are interested in them. She
says that here's a quote. Often those kind of programs
(05:05):
have been criticized because they attract people who are already
physically active. In general, there are two categories of people
who use these trackers, those who are told to wear
them by a doctor because of an underlying health problem
and those who are really active and just get a
kick out of knowing their data. Now, none of that
is a smack against these activity trackers and whether or
(05:26):
not they are effective in what they do. She is
simply saying that this is the person side of that equation,
not the technology side of that equation. So let's assume
that at least some of you guys out there listening
are very much interested in this kind of stuff, and
you are either interested in just knowing how they work
in general, or you're actually thinking, hey, I would kind
of like to look into one of these How do
(05:49):
they track activity? What exactly is being tracked? And what
other features might I be interested in if I want
to get one of these things myself. So I thought
we'd talked a little bit about some of the basic
technologies that you find inside some of these trackers, all right,
because these little these little bitty watch sized or bracelet
(06:09):
sized or clips clips, you know, you have very very
small devices these days. You can pack a lot of
tracking devices into them. Yeah, the sensors that are available
now really boggle the mind. And like we said, I
don't think there is a device out there that has
every single version of what we're about to talk about.
But they I have not seen one. Yeah, but but
(06:29):
many of them have several some of them only have
one or two some and it may be that the
way that they're packaged is very attractive, but they but
from a technological point of view, they are comparatively simple.
But I think one very basic technology we can talk
about that you can find and in fact, some people
will argue that this is really all you need if
(06:50):
you just want to track some basic activity. Is a predometer, right,
and these have been mechanical predometers. I believe it's been
around since the nineteen sixties. And they hypothetic like this
is this is tenuous, tenuous reportage. But but some people
say that the da Vinci or Thomas Jefferson came up
with the idea many many moons ago. Yeah, that's a
pretty big spread in years if I know my history.
(07:14):
But yeah, and I do. But yeah, a podometer today,
it takes a pretty basic form. Usually you have some
sort of display that's going to tell you how many
steps you have taken. That's what a podometer does. It's
supposed to measure how many steps you take. So how
does it do that. It's essentially counting the number of
times your foot makes impact with the ground. And really
(07:35):
that means it's just measuring various shaking of your body.
So if you are in a car and you're on
a particularly bumpy road, it's going to start registering that
as footsteps if it's particularly bumpy, right, or or if
you hold it in your hand and sway your arm
back and forth, you would totally fool the device, right,
not that I know that from prior get Fit corporate
(07:56):
UM programs that I have cheated a tiny bit on right, Uh,
if you're not benefiting anyone at that point, let's let's
stop the cheating. Hey, Lauren, aren't you the team captain
of our own departmental cheating. I was demonstrating to people
how the device worked, and I was accused of using
that as a way of boosting your numbers. All right,
(08:19):
team captain, Now I've learned a little more about you.
So anyway, what's what's going on here is inside the
pedometer you have a a system that essentially forms a switch.
All right, You've got you've got a weight, and when
that weight moves it can make a connection that closes
a switch and counts as a step. And then when
it moves away that and hits it again, that counts
(08:42):
as another step. So every time this weight disconnects and
then reconnects with a contact, a step is registered. And uh,
you know, it used to be that these were pretty
big mechanical things where you had a weight suspended on
like a spring or a pendulum or a small ball
that could roll back and forth, a cross a tiny track.
Right now, we're talking about things that are on the
(09:03):
the micro structure level. But it's still this basic mechanical
motion of making a contact, breaking a contact, and that
every time you do that break is what counts is
a step. Yeah, so uh, it's still still the same
mechanical approach. It's just now it's much much, much, much
smaller than what it used to be back in the
sixties or earlier. If we are to believe that some
(09:28):
of our our genius ancestors came up with this idea,
it was probably Tesla, yeah, and it always ends up
being Tesla, although his probably would also bring down an airplane.
So uh. Anyway, the old predometers, if you would actually
pick one up and shake it, you might hear a
clicking noise, and that's the little switch that's inside it. Again,
it might be that little ball if it's using that
(09:50):
particular kind of technology. The newer ones, again, are all
chip based. They don't have those little those They don't
have things large enough to make that kind of clicking
noise unless you've been shaking it way too hard, in
which case something is probably loose and it may not
be working at all. Anymore. But anyway, that's your very
basic pedometer. So it's not terribly accurate in the sense
(10:12):
that it can't it can't distinguish between different kinds of
impact and say, oh, well that was definitely a step
versus that was just a bump, right, um. But they
are getting a little bit more technologically advanced in that.
Originally you had to use the counter and combine that
with a calculation of how long each of your steps
were in order to calculate distance. These days, they can
(10:33):
do that for you with onboard computers. Sure. Oh so
instead of saying like, oh, my stride is this many
inches long, therefore this many steps and having to get
a little bit of math. By the way, I said inches,
and I would say miles because I live in America
and that's what we do. But centimeters meters that kind
of thing, right, it would It does the math depending
on what scale you're using. The more advanced version of
(10:57):
this sort of approach is the accelerometer. Now, an accelerometer
is different. It's not got a little switch that's just
registering a change. Yeah, it's not just like that was
a shake. It's actually detecting changes in velocity. Uh. Now,
velocity is speed plus direction. So if you alter that velocity,
(11:20):
then you are talking about an accelerating force. So, for example,
when you start, when you start from a standstill and
you start moving into a run, that's accelerating. You're accelerating
into a run. Now, once you hit top speed, you
are no longer accelerating. You may be maintaining a speed.
But accelerat arometers are all meant to detect these changes
(11:40):
in velocity. And you've got two basic categories of accelerometers.
There are many types of accelerometer rometers, but they fall
into two basic categories. They're static accelerometers. Now, these measure
a static uh form of acceleration. For instance, gravity, Gravity
is static, it's not changing when you are on the
(12:02):
surface of the Earth. It's going to remain the same.
And so you might wonder why would you need a
stack accelerometer. It's so that you can determine the rotation
of a device in respect to the surface of the Earth.
Very important for something like a smartphone, where you are
holding the smartphone, you move it from portrait to landscape,
(12:23):
the static accelerometer is what tells it, oh, the the
the attitude of this phone has changed not that you're
giving off attitude. Necessarily, you might be texting I don't
I usually amy, this is fair, but and rather the
position in relative to the surface of the earth. So
if you were to turn it into the landscape mode,
the screen would would change to reflect that. That's why
(12:48):
a stack accelerometer is useful. For dynamic accelerometers, they measure
changes in motion of the accelerometer itself. So the accelerometer
is part of the larger device. So this is too
measure the changes in acceleration of that device, not in
respect to the ground, but just within that device itself.
So you might have both types in a fitness tracker.
(13:10):
If the fitness tracker has some sort of screen that
will rotate depending upon how you're holding your arm. Let's
say it's a it's a screen that's on a wristband
or something that's like a watch, and then it might
have a stack accelerometer and a dynamic one. The dynamic
one would be more useful for it to detect changes
in velocity and thus translate that into motion that the
(13:31):
user is moving around, and that means that the user
is burning calories and is there's there's activity going on,
so that's part of the data that this device will
gather and analyze to translate that into this is what
your body is doing right right, and we should we
should add at this point that UM, that a lot
(13:53):
of the actual output of data that these devices are
giving you is not UM. Is not the actual data
that these sensors are making in a lot of it
is UM really fancy algorithms. And and thank you to
Peter on Facebook for writing it and telling me that
I totally say that wrong sometimes because I do UM.
You know, it's it's it's approximating more complex technology, or
(14:13):
it's UM gathering together a bunch of these little tiny
numbers and figuring out something useful that I can tell
you in return, exactly taking this raw data and making
it meaningful to us, because otherwise we really what an
accelerometer would tell you is how much voltage it was generating,
which doesn't help us at all. That doesn't that's not
meaningful to at least it's not meaningful to me, and
(14:35):
I suspect not to Lauren. Uh. Some of you electricians
out there might say, no, I totally get it, but
the rest of us are thinking, no, we need this
translated into something that makes sense like how many calories
did I burn or how many steps did I take
or how far did I go? So that's that's the
basic uh two kinds of accelerometers. The the types underneath
(14:56):
those are how they detect these changes in the law city. UH.
And there's a lot there's there are capacitive ones, there's
piece of electric, there's pizza resistive, there's magneto resistive, there's
heat transfer. There's lots of different types. There's some that
use light. But the one that I think, the type
that's used the most in electronics as far as I
(15:17):
can tell, is the capacitive type. And so you might
wonder how does this work. You've got some micro structures
within a chip, all right. One of them is you've
got a housing which is is mounted directly to whatever
the devices on a substrate. So this housing uh will
move in uh the same way that the device itself moves.
(15:40):
It's it's dependent upon that. Then you've got a little
micro structure inside of it that can move freely uh
in respect to the housing. So if you were to
shake the device, the micro structure would lag a little
bit and then pick up that motion, just as if
you had a spring with a ball on the end,
(16:00):
and you started moving the top of the spring and
then the ball would start to move. It's this whole
momentum thing that's coming up. You've also got these other
little bitty structures, these micro structures inside this this tiny
little chip, and I'm talking about teeny tiny we're we're
tug on the level of microns. Yeah, these are all
called a microelectro mechanical systems. Yeah, they're they're so small
that you have to have an automated system to etch
(16:21):
them onto chips because there's no human with the precision
necessary to make these things so super tiny. But as
the microstructure moves, it starts to move between these plates
that have capacitance. That changes the capacities. It causes current
to flow, and measuring the current tells you how much
this device is moving. And by putting these chips in
(16:43):
different arrangements within a device, you can track different types
of movement. Because you can only detect movement along one
axis with a with a very simple accelerometer. Uh, that
means that you can detect movement along one line of
one one vector. Really you can't anything up beyond that.
It wouldn't detect So let's say left right versus up down. Uh.
(17:06):
If you had three of these accelerometers or to two
axis accelerometers that were at right angles to one another,
you could then detect things like along the x axis,
the y axis, and the z axis. So three axis
accelerometers what we call those, and those are that those
are the popular ones and in all of the new
devices coming out these days. Yeah, and it's also the
kind of stuff you find in things like video game controllers. Uh.
(17:27):
And it's some of them you hear about six axis,
which is really just getting more specifically precise. Um. Yeah,
and so this will detect those changes in motion and
be able to translate that into again meaningful data once
you run those raw numbers through whatever software you've got. Uh.
So those are your two basic ways of detecting motion
(17:49):
from a purely like this device is moving kind of perspective.
There are other things that will also detect motion, which
we'll talk about as well in a little bit. Before
I get to that, though, I do need to say
there's a couple of are things that are important about accelerometers.
One is that sensitivity of an accelerometer is extremely important.
The more sensitive and accelerometer is, then the more it
(18:10):
will generate a larger charge in our larger change in
signal rather for a given change and acceleration compared to
a less sensitive chip. So these bigger changes are easier
to measure, and that gives the device a better idea
of the actual changes in acceleration. So, in other words,
if you if you make it so that these changes
(18:30):
are are huge, uh, it can really narrow down the
parameters of what that change means, and it can be
more precise in thinking this is more likely an actual
step versus someone just bump their knee on their desk
and went out, yeah, yeah, that the technology is getting
a lot better at um weeding out those false positives exactly.
And then there are other things you've got to keep
(18:52):
in mind, like what's the maximum swing of your accelerometer
that's telling you how much force it can measure or
how much of a change in nextceleration it can measure. Uh,
this is really more important if you are designing something
that moves really really fast and comes to really fast
stops like a jet, not so much with a person,
because while you feel you might be fast compared to
(19:13):
other stuff, you're really slow less less fast than the jet.
And then you have bandwidth, which is how many times
a second you can take a reliable acceleration reading. Uh.
And we don't need anything too precise for human activity
because again we're not moving that quickly. But these are
things that are important in accelerometers in general. Uh. We've
got a lot more to talk about as far as
(19:33):
the sensors go within this these uh, these activity trackers.
But before we get into that, let's take a quick
moment to thank our sponsor. Alright, we're back. So, so
we've talked about accelerometers and photometers, there is one other
way the device can track whether or not you've moved around, right,
Because accelerometers are really great fear for example, on a treadmill, Yeah,
fantastic because it doesn't have to track your location. It
(19:56):
just has to track what you are doing. But if
you have a EPs receiver in your activity tracker, and
some of them do with them, you can actually track
where you are in relation to I don't know anything
else on the planet. But these are not so useful
if you're just running on a treadmill. No, but but
they are very much more accurate for calculating the distance
(20:17):
that you have gone, right. Yeah. So GPS in general,
this Global Positioning system, Uh, what what's going on is
You've got the satellites that are beaming down information here
to the planet and network of twenty four of them. Yeah,
so your GPS receiver receives this these signals from the
various satellites. Now, each satellite is sending its own unique
(20:38):
signal down that has essentially a time stamp on it, right,
and they're all synchronized. Right, So you're getting these different
signals all at the same time from at least usually
at least three satellites. Four works best, four works best,
and and so your device gets these different signals from
these different satellites, and by measuring how long it took
the signal from each satellite to get to that uh,
(21:01):
that device it just compares that against its own its
own little internal clock. It can tell you where you
are in the surface of the Earth. Technically you could
be in one of two places, but that second places
inside the earth, So we pretty much just say that's
not it cuts that right out. Yeah, and that this
was originally military technology, I believe in the seventies and nineties,
(21:26):
in fact, when when we first started getting consumer access
to the Global Positioning System, Uh, the accuracy of that
system for consumers was limited on purpose, right, Yeah. They
they put limitters into the devices to say like, yeah,
we don't really want you to know this. Then we
can say you are somewhere within feet here is here ish.
(21:48):
But now they're very, very accurate. That's eventually gotten to
the point where, uh, you know, it's it's just the
way technology works accurate. Yeah. Yeah, So the GPS receiver
will act where you are by by taking all this
information from the satellites and running that through its own
algorithm and then determining what your location is on the Earth.
(22:09):
And that way you can do something like, uh, if
you jog a specific path and you really liked it,
you can plot it against a map and share it
with other people. Or you can just you know, see
how far you went based upon some mapping program. It
may be that you could compare how far you went
based from the map compared to whatever the activity tracker says.
(22:30):
Because some of these have multiple sensors in them, right,
some of them might have a pedometer or some other
um means of saying this is how many steps you
took and use these in conjunction to Yeah, and it's
funny because I've seen somewhere they do both. They have
the GPS tracker and they have the pedometer part where
it tells you how far you went based upon how
many steps you took, and you can compare the two
(22:51):
to see how accurate the pedometer is, and in some
cases it's not so accurate. That's why reading reviews is
really important because you might you might say, well, if
I by the predometer, it says I ran four point
five miles, but when I look at the map it
says two miles. So yeah, that is a that is
a large difference. Yeah, there there was actually a review
I saw that specifically said that. Okay, so those are
(23:12):
all the various kinds of sensors and technologies that might
be an activity tracker to motion that you moving around,
but there are other sensors to right, Yeah, there's a
whole bunch of them. Um. And these these are all
the physiological sensors that are going to track things like
your sweat and your heart rate. And there's been a
bunch of different things over the years that have that
(23:34):
have contributed to this. The original heart rate monitor, of course,
was the electro cardiogram a k a. The e c
G or e kg UM and that was using electrical
pickups in an amplifier circuit that would detect the hearts
electrical impulses through your skin. Um. And you know, when
when your heart beats, it the way that it does
it is it generates these pulses, It sends a signal
(23:56):
out over the nerve pathways on the surface of the
heart that caused the muscle to contract during each heartbeat.
And by picking up those electrical signals, you can you
can track your heartbeat, which is really groovy for um,
for knowing how hard your body is working, right, because
I mean, there's there are a lot of things that
are important when you're exercising, right. It's not just how
much activity you're doing, how many calories you're burning. If
(24:18):
you want to have really good cardio workouts, if you
want to have a good aerobic workout, then you need
to get to have your heart beating and within a
certain range for a certain amount of time, right. Uh.
And and that's I'll get into that a little bit
more and in the moment, but uh, e c G
s are a little bit more clunky. Um. Usually they
work with a chest strap that many runners, especially because
(24:41):
they're they're they're bouncing around, moving a lot, found very
uncomfortable to wear. UM. And So a new technology that
has come out and has become the standard in noninvasive
heart rate sensor sensory m has been the photo platesmograph
a k A. The PPG, which may or may not
be called an optical heart sensor for people who don't
(25:03):
even want to mess with that entire word. Gotcha, Well, yeah,
photo would tell me that there's light that's playing a
role in this somehow. Yes, PPGs bounce light and most
cases from an l ED in terms of fitness trackers,
because LEDs are cool bulbs that will not you know,
burn your skin, burn your skin, which is cool. Um Uh.
They bounce light through your skin and back to a
(25:24):
sensor and measure the volume of blood moving through your capillaries.
And the way this works is that blood absorbs more
light than it's surrounding tissue. So the less light that
comes back to the sensor, the greater the volume of
blood is moving through those capillaries at the time. UM.
And and this this volume pulses with each heartbeat and
so by tracking those pulses, a PPG tracks your heart
(25:47):
rate at rest and during exercise. That's really cool. So
this is the same sort of thing you get when
you go into a doctor's office and they have like
the little finger clamp thing that ends and it uses
it shines a light onto your fingertip. That is exactly
what that is. UM. And these these days they have
become they're they're they're getting a little bit more sensitive
and UH. And most of them will come in watch
(26:08):
format and it will be right against the inside of
your wrist. But you know there they can they can
be thrown off by the movement of your skin and muscles. UM,
which happens during workouts pretty frequently in light I would imagine,
can also cause problems. So some models are pairing a
PPG with an accelerometer, sometimes a devoted accelerometer, in order
to compensate for your body's movement. Cool and UH also
(26:33):
also an interesting point, not entirely relevant fitness trackers, but
I thought that this was so cool. PPG works differently
with different wavelengths of light, and so in laboratory and
hospital situations, infrared radiation can sometimes be used to assess
blood volume in deep tissue, whereas light in the visible
range is used in smaller, more commercial devices like these
(26:54):
fitness trackers. Oh excellent, awesome, So what else? Okay, so
we've got we've got various ways of tracking the how
hard or how quickly your heart is beating. We've got
the idea of position. Are there other ones as well?
Another great thing to figure out how much you're exerting
yourself is the galvanic skin response censor, which is a
really fancy way of saying, how much are you sweating
(27:16):
right now? Um? It attracts your perspiration by measuring the
conductivity of your skin. Um, because your skin is a
pretty good conductor of of of electricity to begin with,
but when it's wet a k a. When you're sweating,
it's an even better conductor. So um, so yeah. The
the the amount that you're perspiring relates to how much
(27:37):
you're exerting yourself, and so by tracking this this conductivity,
you can track your exertion. Another great way is through thermometers,
good old thermometers um, sometimes infra red, sometimes heat flux,
which just detecting the increase in temperature on you on
the surface of your skin. Right, yeah, as well as
(27:57):
I assume there has to be one to detect ambient
to perature as well. It's usually two paired thermometers. Yeah,
one tracking your body temperature exactly, one tracking the ambient temperature.
Because you're a higher body temperature means that you're working harder,
and you'd also be working harder in a colder ambient temperature. Gotcha, gotcha,
as opposed to it's just plain hot, right exactly right,
(28:19):
all right. So these are various trackers and sensors that
you can find in a lot of the activity trackers
that are out there. There are other ones as well.
Some of them are much more specific, and when you
get down to things like, well how does it track
your sleep? Well, that's usually things you know, tracking the
changes in motion. Again, it's usually the accelerometer. If it
has something that tracks your heart rate, it will be
(28:40):
tracking your heart rate. Yeah, but it's basically it's usually
how much you're wiggling around. Yeah. Yeah, So so if
you you know, it'll that's all when you plug in
this device, when you sink sink it with whatever, whether
it's an app or it's your computer, uh, and you
get the data back saying you had a really good
night's sleep, and maybe because you took it off and
set it down next to you instead of or it. Um.
(29:01):
So yeah, I mean these are these are the basic
ways that gathers information. Now. The way it processes information
is different from one company to the next. It's all
various proprietary softwares and algorithms that take this, crunch the data,
and turn it into stuff that makes sense to us. Yeah,
some of them have really great onboard computers for doing that. Um,
it's very tiny onboard computers for doing that to to
(29:23):
give you a little bit of a live output, and
some of them give you zero live output other than
maybe a little blinking led or something like that. Right,
I had a body media fit, for example, and that
did not have its own screen. Rather, it would you
would have to sink that either to an app via Bluetooth,
or you would sink it to your computer via a
USB cable, and then you could make sense of what
(29:45):
information had been collecting. But you couldn't even tell what
it had been collecting until you did that. Right, There
was no uh screen indicators, so you couldn't read it
at a moment's notice unless you have to have your
phone they're paired with it, in which case you could
pull up the app and take a look that way. Um,
but yeah, there are other devices that have a dedicate screen,
so it's going to give you at least some information,
if not everything. And you know, it's again that depends
(30:07):
very highly on your personal preference and how much information
you need at the moment and how much you just
kind of want to check up on it later. Yeah,
And and some of these will give you information that's
in uh, very kind of concrete terms in the sense
of this is how far you walked, or this is
how how much activity your heart has had today. You know,
how how how often were you in that perfect zone
(30:29):
when you were working out versus you weren't quite pushing
yourself as hard as you needed to, or maybe you
were pushing yourself too hard you need to pull back off.
Some of them are a little more vague, like so
Nike's fuel Band, for example, everything's in fuel points and
and I know that the fuel band is very popular.
(30:50):
It's a gorgeous device, looks very full disclosure. My wife
has one. She loves it. She and she has the
app that it's paired up with her iPhone. So she
can see what's going on, but it's doing everything in
fuel points, and some people have said, some critics have
said that that makes it less useful because you don't
(31:12):
know what they mean necessarily. I think, well, you know,
it always reminds me of Microsoft Points and how you're
kind of sort of tricking the system in order to
make it a little bit more of a game and
less of a reality, which helps lots of people actually,
because because a lot of people don't want to know
how many steps they've taken. They're like, oh, that was
a lot of I wasted so much time getting fit yesterday.
(31:34):
Why did I do that? But if you get fuel points,
then you get especially especially if it has a gamification
element to it, where you are measuring your own activity
versus the activity of other people. If you set your
if you have a way of setting a specific goal
using one of these trackers, and the tracker can keep
track of that so that it will tell you, Hey,
you met your goal today. That's a reward system, right
(31:56):
you You immediately get that reward, that that sense of
satisfact and that you have met your goal for that day.
Then you have the added sasfaction. If there's a gamification
level there beyond just just getting the badge for yourself.
If you can share that badge with your friends and say, hey, guys,
check what I did. Did you do it? You didn't
do it? Stuck up right. Yeah. So if you're all
(32:16):
using like fitbits, for example, I know people who are
using fitbits as a way of challenging each other to
see how many steps they could take. Uh, and they would.
You know, there'd be groups of friends who were trying
to walk out walk each other, which is great. I mean,
you know, yeah, if that gives you the motivation to
get exercise, that's great. You know, there's there's nothing wrong
(32:37):
with using the desire to rub your friends faces and
your achievements in order for you to get fit, as
long as you, you know, practice some restraint a little
bit hytically, I can tell you that a punch to
the face is not good for your physical fitness. But yeah, so,
and there are other levels of a gamification to There's
some devices out there that have games built into the
(32:59):
software of the device or on the computer that you play,
so that as you use the device, as you move around,
you generate like online currency to play in a little
online game to Strive has that there's a little online
game where you can as you walk around, you generate coins,
and using those coins you can buy stuff in the
game world of a little bit like Sonics rings or
(33:21):
something like that. Yeah, like Conville, but using this you
generate the currency just by moving around, so that's the incentive. Yeah,
or um. An office favorite for a while was a
Zombie Run I think is the name of the app?
Which which which? I think it's run Zombie Run something
like that, something like that. Yes, that that gave you.
It was hooked up to a GPS related system on
(33:43):
your cell phone, and I would would give you these
little like are you out running the zombies or are
you totally dying? Right? Yeah? I I used to have.
In fact, I had the beta version of that app
back when it came out in the beta form for Android,
and the way I don't know if it still works
this way. I haven't used the app in a long time,
but the way it originally worked was that you would
be somewhere and you would tell it where you wanted
(34:03):
to go. You would open up a map program and
this zombie app and say, all right, here's you know
based on my GPS location, this is where I am,
this is where I want to go. It would then
generate these virtual zombies on the map that could actually move,
so the little blips would start moving toward you, and
your goal was to get to your destination without being
intercepted by one of those little zombie blips. So you
(34:25):
might have to find a different route than the one
you had intended, and you may have to book it,
and yeah, yeah, you might have to. You might have
to speed up and slow down, which in running terms
is is actually really great for training. So and there
were also, as I recall, there were story elements to
that game as well that that were added in later.
I had it where it was just the game mechanic,
but I know, and it may not even be that
(34:46):
app It maybe a similar one, because there were a
few that came out that had the same sort of theme.
But there was one where there was an overall progressive
storyline and as you participated, you would unlock more of
the story. I got eaten. I couldn't get from I
couldn't get from the train station to my house because
there was really there was only one way you could
(35:07):
go by foot, and it kept wanting me to cut
through the woods. I kept wanting to not run into
barbed wire fences that are hard to see. Look, if
you don't bring your bolt cutters to the zombie apocalypse,
then I don't think you're going to get very far.
And I'm no longer allowed to bring my bolt cutters
to work. That was the problem, right, because this was
my commute back home, and so I already had that
(35:28):
limitation set on me. I tell you, you make one
silly mistake with a with an internet line and they
just never let you forget it. It's crazy. We're very
unforgiving here and how stuff works. But the game of
vacation obviously plays a big part. Yeah, and you know
it's it's the recommended target number of steps per day
for for healthy human people is about ten thousand and
(35:50):
um and that's that equals out to maybe about five
miles and uh and and yeah, so anything that helps
people get to that. And and in fact, Dina Bravada,
the person I mentioned at the top of the podcast,
who you know, she's she's a specialist in in health
matters and has expressed some skeptic skepticism as to whether
or not these activity trackers are really you know, a
(36:11):
huge benefit. I mean, they helped the people who are
already interested. But she did notice she did a study
or she was part of the study where uh they
gave pedometers to a group of participants, UH in a
randomized trial where some some participants didn't get a podometer,
some did, and they were all asked to uh kind
of track their activities. And it turned out that the
(36:32):
people who had the pedometers increased their physical activity by
about two thousand three steps per day over the baseline.
And uh and so that ended up being a twenty
seven percent increase in physical activity. And that's provided said, well,
that's significant. So if you have, if you're actually using
one of these things and you're paying attention to it,
(36:54):
then you are more likely to actually engage in more
physical activity and thus exercise more and be have a
healthier lifestyle. Um. And that's that's the chief argument for
these activity trackers is the idea that with this information
you can really be more mindful of what you are
doing and how it's affecting you. A lot of these
(37:15):
activity trackers come with software that also have as part
of it a way of keeping a a food journal,
which is also very important because you could be exercising,
but if you're not eating well, then that's not gonna
help you. You can be sabotaging yourself certainly. So for example,
the body media fit device I had, uh part of
(37:35):
the software that you would have once you had to
subscribe to it. So you you'd have to buy the
device and you had to subscribe to the service. But
once you subscribe to the service, you could track your meals.
And every meal you would track, it would tell you
how many calories you've consumed. It would break it down
by what type of calories they were, etcetera. And then
the the information from the device would tell you how
(37:56):
many calories you would burned. And so that would give
you an idea like did I burn more reason I consumed?
If I did, then I'm on the road to losing weight.
I mean that's a that's a very basic way of
figuring it out, calories out. But uh, it also meant
that you were much more mindful when you started doing
things like you sat down for a meal. You'd think, oh,
wait a minute, you know, if I want to if
I want to be on track and I don't want
(38:17):
to have to go home and run five miles. I
probably shouldn't pig out on that deep fried onion, even
though it's super tasty. Now, there is a flip side
to this coin, of course, we're talking all about keeping
all this data and really looking at and making something meaningful. Uh,
there can come a point where too much data is
actually harmful, where you're just you're just overwhelmed by all
(38:40):
the information and you can't really see a way of
using it in a in a way that makes sense.
That can happen. I don't know that most I think
most activity trackers are pretty good where you're not going
to get that much unless you're really digging down and
you want to see. Oh, no, I want to I
want this in pie chart form. No, I wanted in
line graph form. But that is one of those things
(39:00):
that we're going to be looking into later in a
in a later episode of tech Stuff. We've already planned
on recording this. We haven't recorded it yet, but we
want to do an episode where we're talking about kind
of that anxiety you get when you have so much
information that you know, you start to think, is my
life being boiled down to data points and charts? Yeah,
and how much of that is healthy, and you know,
(39:20):
it's it's yeah, whether whether or not it's okay that
we know so much about ourselves at any given second. Yeah,
I've I know more about me than I'm comfortable with.
But uh, and that's for a later episode. And I
really do think that most of these physical activity trackers
aren't quite at that level. It is a little interesting
to you know, sit there and say, oh, look at
my sleep patterns. What can I do to make these better? Uh,
(39:43):
there's really only so much you can do. And you know,
you can try and make sure that the environment you're
in is conducive to sleep and rest, but there are
a lot of little things that you can that you
can work on that that a lot of people might
not be completely aware of. Um. And and again a
lot of this is just about awareness. And along those lines, um,
(40:03):
you know, these these fitness trackers that we were talking
about can run from fifty fifty dollars on the low end,
I guess, you know, ten dollars for up to two
for some of the super fancy ones, or or even
more for the really high level performance triathlon kind of things.
So there's a huge I mean or down to free
apps that you can download for your smartphone right, which
is mostly using GPS tracking to figure out how far
(40:26):
you've gone exactly, keeping in mind that that's not necessarily
going to translate into a very accurate measure of how
much how many calories you burn, but you at least
give you an idea of how far you went. Uh,
you know, it's It's definitely something that I've been interested
in the past. And you know, we're about to do
this exercise thing here at work where we all have pedometers,
(40:46):
so I'm sure we're gonna I'm in a group with
Holly Fry, who is a marathon runner, so I know
my group is going to do really well. Yeah, so
I don't plan on moving for most of July. Uh,
that's the spirit. But but you know, it really depends
on what you want the device for, how you're going
(41:06):
to use it, and also, like we said, read reviews,
because some of the ones that are really expensive may
not have all the features you want and may not
perform better than than less right, and they might just
be you know, for a different subset of human person
than than you happen to be and not yea, not
all of these are for everybody. If I may make
a personal recommendation. D C. Rainmaker has a blog that
(41:29):
is brilliant. He's a triathlon runner, but um our triathlon
athlete who who's just triathlete, Yes, that would be that
would be the technical term for that. Who has just
reviewed all of the devices, all of them, all of them,
and and and he gets very highly technical, which I love,
(41:50):
um and but but also tends to put his his
kind of final thoughts in an extremely succinct package. Excellent, excellent,
good recommendation. Yeah, uh, and you know again, take a look,
find out what's going to work right, work well for you.
You know, if if you have one that's going to
sync up with a smartphone, make sure that it's compatible
with which you with your smartphone. Make sure that your
(42:11):
smartphone has the type of Bluetooth that the device wants
to sync up with, because that can be very very messy. Right.
You can say, well, it was supposed to work with
an iOS device, and technically this iPhone three G is
an iOS device, but you know, yeah, that's obviously something
you want to make sure is all all working before
you you dive in. But uh, yeah, I think these
(42:33):
are really interesting devices. I've seen some great implementations. I've
seen some gorgeous designs. The body media fit thing I
had worked really well for me. Um, I haven't been
using it for a while, but uh it's you know,
it was definitely an interesting thing that that you wear
it all the time except when you're going to get wet,
and uh so that was kind of interesting the idea
(42:54):
that this became a part of me for for several months.
And I did lose weight because I was very my
full about my activity and what I was eating, and um,
you know, I should really get back into it. But uh,
not that I've gained a lot of weight. But could
you stand to lose a few more pounds anyone who's
watched forward thinking we would do. But anyway, everyone everyone
(43:15):
can stand to be a little bit more said. Probably
probably so, Guys, if you have any suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff. You've got some question about a
type of device, or a company or a person in tech,
or just a concept that you want to know more
about that's technologically relevant, please let us know. You can
get in touch with us by email our addresses tech
(43:37):
Stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line
on Facebook or Twitter. You can find us there. We
have to handle tech stuff. HS double and Lauren and
I will talk to you again really soon for more
on this and bathans of other topics because it has
to have work dot Com. This is a kid che
With technology with hook stuff from how stuff dot com everything.
Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan's
Trickland and on Lauren Vocbum and we're gonna track your
activity with activity trackers. That's what we're talking about today.
(00:25):
We're talking about various devices that allow you to see
how much activity you've you've you've generated over a certain
amount of time, and sometimes it helps you figure out
how many calories you've burned or how well you've been sleeping.
We want to talk about what these devices are, what
they do, how they do it, and whether or not
they're actually effective if you want to do something like
(00:46):
lose weight or get fit. Yeah. Just I mean, you know,
not that that many people are interested in that kind
of thing, you know, Yeah, there's like maybe two right, Okay,
So the last few times I've gone to C E
S I have noticed really it was I think it
was two years ago where that it was dramatically apparent
that fitness tracking and activity tracking is a real thing.
I mean, it's it's huge, huge, booming industry. Yeah. Well,
(01:09):
I mean, you know, as as between circuitry getting smaller
and uh sinking, technology improving and the software improving, and
just all of these things have been coming together to
create these smaller, sleeker, you know, better devices that can
really help people out things that are things like interoperability
to where it can interact with computers or smartphones. Not
(01:31):
not every device does that. Let's be clear about that.
There are a lot of devices out there that have
kind of a limited use like that. Maybe they just
sink with a computer, or maybe it's just a standalone device,
but a lot of them do sync up with more
than one device. You could do it with a smartphone
application or or a computer or other things as well,
and they'll let you They'll let you up port port
(01:53):
whatever data you record into different apps, so that if,
for example, you're into this kind of thing and you
have a favorite app you can you can use that
one to crunch your numbers rather than whatever other proprietary
thing they have created. Right, Right, So this gives you
a chance to, uh, to really keep a good look,
you know, get a really good look at how much
activity you are you have throughout a given amount of time,
(02:15):
like a week or a day. So you might say,
all right, I want to set a goal for myself
and this device will help me measure up against that
goal and decide, you know, am I am I meeting
my goal? Do I need to uh to crank up
the activity? Do I need to maybe you know, do
a three mile jog in the morning in order to
hit what my goals are? Do I need to UM
(02:37):
to scale back or for for for hardcore trainers, am
I running my heart rate too hard? Yeah? Yeah, So
it all depends on what device you have, whether or
not you can actually do these things, because, like we said,
not every device does everything. In fact, depending upon what
you want, that's going to really guide your choices when
it comes to picking an activity tracker. If you're interested
(02:58):
in something like that, absolutely and is um there's a
lot of really terrific reviews out there on the internet.
We'll mentioned at least one good site to go to
later on in the podcast. Yeah, there's I came across
lots and lots of them. And it's interesting too because
you can see where the different preferences come into play,
because one reviewer might say, well, you know, X is
(03:18):
the best activity tracker because it does things this way,
and someone else will say, no, no no, no, why is
the best activity tracker because it does things in this
other way, and it's just because it appeals to that
particular person a very personal choice. Right So, so that's
one thing you can get you can walk away with
right now, is that we're not gonna at the end
of this podcast. It's not like we're gonna say the
best activity tracker is blah blah blah, because it all
(03:41):
depends on what you want to get out of it now. Frankly,
I think if you are looking at one of these things,
the thing you really want to get out of it
is is making sure that you are living a healthy lifestyle.
And most of the ones that are on the market
right now will help you do that, depending on how
you use it. It's it's not magic device that automatically
(04:01):
turns you into a fit pro athlete right now. Now.
You have to you have to have your own personal
sense of motivation about exercising first. Probably obtaining a fitness
tracker is going to be one of the steps that
you're you know, carrying out in this motivation um and
and study studies have shown um that that that just
mindfulness about this kind of thing can really help you
(04:23):
out from lots lots of different corners of health and
fitness when when you are given the power to track
your own data and to kind of take it into
your own hands like that, maybe gamify at a tiny
bit um you, it really helps you out right. There's
an expert, her name's Dina Bravada. I'm sure you ran
(04:43):
across her name several times as well, because it's all
over the place in the research on activity tracking, and
she has said that there there is a bit of
a bias that's present with activity trackers in the sense
of the people who who are interested in them. She
says that here's a quote. Often those kind of programs
(05:05):
have been criticized because they attract people who are already
physically active. In general, there are two categories of people
who use these trackers, those who are told to wear
them by a doctor because of an underlying health problem
and those who are really active and just get a
kick out of knowing their data. Now, none of that
is a smack against these activity trackers and whether or
(05:26):
not they are effective in what they do. She is
simply saying that this is the person side of that equation,
not the technology side of that equation. So let's assume
that at least some of you guys out there listening
are very much interested in this kind of stuff, and
you are either interested in just knowing how they work
in general, or you're actually thinking, hey, I would kind
of like to look into one of these How do
(05:49):
they track activity? What exactly is being tracked? And what
other features might I be interested in if I want
to get one of these things myself. So I thought
we'd talked a little bit about some of the basic
technologies that you find inside some of these trackers, all right,
because these little these little bitty watch sized or bracelet
(06:09):
sized or clips clips, you know, you have very very
small devices these days. You can pack a lot of
tracking devices into them. Yeah, the sensors that are available
now really boggle the mind. And like we said, I
don't think there is a device out there that has
every single version of what we're about to talk about.
But they I have not seen one. Yeah, but but
(06:29):
many of them have several some of them only have
one or two some and it may be that the
way that they're packaged is very attractive, but they but
from a technological point of view, they are comparatively simple.
But I think one very basic technology we can talk
about that you can find and in fact, some people
will argue that this is really all you need if
(06:50):
you just want to track some basic activity. Is a predometer, right,
and these have been mechanical predometers. I believe it's been
around since the nineteen sixties. And they hypothetic like this
is this is tenuous, tenuous reportage. But but some people
say that the da Vinci or Thomas Jefferson came up
with the idea many many moons ago. Yeah, that's a
pretty big spread in years if I know my history.
(07:14):
But yeah, and I do. But yeah, a podometer today,
it takes a pretty basic form. Usually you have some
sort of display that's going to tell you how many
steps you have taken. That's what a podometer does. It's
supposed to measure how many steps you take. So how
does it do that. It's essentially counting the number of
times your foot makes impact with the ground. And really
(07:35):
that means it's just measuring various shaking of your body.
So if you are in a car and you're on
a particularly bumpy road, it's going to start registering that
as footsteps if it's particularly bumpy, right, or or if
you hold it in your hand and sway your arm
back and forth, you would totally fool the device, right,
not that I know that from prior get Fit corporate
(07:56):
UM programs that I have cheated a tiny bit on right, Uh,
if you're not benefiting anyone at that point, let's let's
stop the cheating. Hey, Lauren, aren't you the team captain
of our own departmental cheating. I was demonstrating to people
how the device worked, and I was accused of using
that as a way of boosting your numbers. All right,
(08:19):
team captain, Now I've learned a little more about you.
So anyway, what's what's going on here is inside the
pedometer you have a a system that essentially forms a switch.
All right, You've got you've got a weight, and when
that weight moves it can make a connection that closes
a switch and counts as a step. And then when
it moves away that and hits it again, that counts
(08:42):
as another step. So every time this weight disconnects and
then reconnects with a contact, a step is registered. And uh,
you know, it used to be that these were pretty
big mechanical things where you had a weight suspended on
like a spring or a pendulum or a small ball
that could roll back and forth, a cross a tiny track.
Right now, we're talking about things that are on the
(09:03):
the micro structure level. But it's still this basic mechanical
motion of making a contact, breaking a contact, and that
every time you do that break is what counts is
a step. Yeah, so uh, it's still still the same
mechanical approach. It's just now it's much much, much, much
smaller than what it used to be back in the
sixties or earlier. If we are to believe that some
(09:28):
of our our genius ancestors came up with this idea,
it was probably Tesla, yeah, and it always ends up
being Tesla, although his probably would also bring down an airplane.
So uh. Anyway, the old predometers, if you would actually
pick one up and shake it, you might hear a
clicking noise, and that's the little switch that's inside it. Again,
it might be that little ball if it's using that
(09:50):
particular kind of technology. The newer ones, again, are all
chip based. They don't have those little those They don't
have things large enough to make that kind of clicking
noise unless you've been shaking it way too hard, in
which case something is probably loose and it may not
be working at all. Anymore. But anyway, that's your very
basic pedometer. So it's not terribly accurate in the sense
(10:12):
that it can't it can't distinguish between different kinds of
impact and say, oh, well that was definitely a step
versus that was just a bump, right, um. But they
are getting a little bit more technologically advanced in that.
Originally you had to use the counter and combine that
with a calculation of how long each of your steps
were in order to calculate distance. These days, they can
(10:33):
do that for you with onboard computers. Sure. Oh so
instead of saying like, oh, my stride is this many
inches long, therefore this many steps and having to get
a little bit of math. By the way, I said inches,
and I would say miles because I live in America
and that's what we do. But centimeters meters that kind
of thing, right, it would It does the math depending
on what scale you're using. The more advanced version of
(10:57):
this sort of approach is the accelerometer. Now, an accelerometer
is different. It's not got a little switch that's just
registering a change. Yeah, it's not just like that was
a shake. It's actually detecting changes in velocity. Uh. Now,
velocity is speed plus direction. So if you alter that velocity,
(11:20):
then you are talking about an accelerating force. So, for example,
when you start, when you start from a standstill and
you start moving into a run, that's accelerating. You're accelerating
into a run. Now, once you hit top speed, you
are no longer accelerating. You may be maintaining a speed.
But accelerat arometers are all meant to detect these changes
(11:40):
in velocity. And you've got two basic categories of accelerometers.
There are many types of accelerometer rometers, but they fall
into two basic categories. They're static accelerometers. Now, these measure
a static uh form of acceleration. For instance, gravity, Gravity
is static, it's not changing when you are on the
(12:02):
surface of the Earth. It's going to remain the same.
And so you might wonder why would you need a
stack accelerometer. It's so that you can determine the rotation
of a device in respect to the surface of the Earth.
Very important for something like a smartphone, where you are
holding the smartphone, you move it from portrait to landscape,
(12:23):
the static accelerometer is what tells it, oh, the the
the attitude of this phone has changed not that you're
giving off attitude. Necessarily, you might be texting I don't
I usually amy, this is fair, but and rather the
position in relative to the surface of the earth. So
if you were to turn it into the landscape mode,
the screen would would change to reflect that. That's why
(12:48):
a stack accelerometer is useful. For dynamic accelerometers, they measure
changes in motion of the accelerometer itself. So the accelerometer
is part of the larger device. So this is too
measure the changes in acceleration of that device, not in
respect to the ground, but just within that device itself.
So you might have both types in a fitness tracker.
(13:10):
If the fitness tracker has some sort of screen that
will rotate depending upon how you're holding your arm. Let's
say it's a it's a screen that's on a wristband
or something that's like a watch, and then it might
have a stack accelerometer and a dynamic one. The dynamic
one would be more useful for it to detect changes
in velocity and thus translate that into motion that the
(13:31):
user is moving around, and that means that the user
is burning calories and is there's there's activity going on,
so that's part of the data that this device will
gather and analyze to translate that into this is what
your body is doing right right, and we should we
should add at this point that UM, that a lot
(13:53):
of the actual output of data that these devices are
giving you is not UM. Is not the actual data
that these sensors are making in a lot of it
is UM really fancy algorithms. And and thank you to
Peter on Facebook for writing it and telling me that
I totally say that wrong sometimes because I do UM.
You know, it's it's it's approximating more complex technology, or
(14:13):
it's UM gathering together a bunch of these little tiny
numbers and figuring out something useful that I can tell
you in return, exactly taking this raw data and making
it meaningful to us, because otherwise we really what an
accelerometer would tell you is how much voltage it was generating,
which doesn't help us at all. That doesn't that's not
meaningful to at least it's not meaningful to me, and
(14:35):
I suspect not to Lauren. Uh. Some of you electricians
out there might say, no, I totally get it, but
the rest of us are thinking, no, we need this
translated into something that makes sense like how many calories
did I burn or how many steps did I take
or how far did I go? So that's that's the
basic uh two kinds of accelerometers. The the types underneath
(14:56):
those are how they detect these changes in the law city. UH.
And there's a lot there's there are capacitive ones, there's
piece of electric, there's pizza resistive, there's magneto resistive, there's
heat transfer. There's lots of different types. There's some that
use light. But the one that I think, the type
that's used the most in electronics as far as I
(15:17):
can tell, is the capacitive type. And so you might
wonder how does this work. You've got some micro structures
within a chip, all right. One of them is you've
got a housing which is is mounted directly to whatever
the devices on a substrate. So this housing uh will
move in uh the same way that the device itself moves.
(15:40):
It's it's dependent upon that. Then you've got a little
micro structure inside of it that can move freely uh
in respect to the housing. So if you were to
shake the device, the micro structure would lag a little
bit and then pick up that motion, just as if
you had a spring with a ball on the end,
(16:00):
and you started moving the top of the spring and
then the ball would start to move. It's this whole
momentum thing that's coming up. You've also got these other
little bitty structures, these micro structures inside this this tiny
little chip, and I'm talking about teeny tiny we're we're
tug on the level of microns. Yeah, these are all
called a microelectro mechanical systems. Yeah, they're they're so small
that you have to have an automated system to etch
(16:21):
them onto chips because there's no human with the precision
necessary to make these things so super tiny. But as
the microstructure moves, it starts to move between these plates
that have capacitance. That changes the capacities. It causes current
to flow, and measuring the current tells you how much
this device is moving. And by putting these chips in
(16:43):
different arrangements within a device, you can track different types
of movement. Because you can only detect movement along one
axis with a with a very simple accelerometer. Uh, that
means that you can detect movement along one line of
one one vector. Really you can't anything up beyond that.
It wouldn't detect So let's say left right versus up down. Uh.
(17:06):
If you had three of these accelerometers or to two
axis accelerometers that were at right angles to one another,
you could then detect things like along the x axis,
the y axis, and the z axis. So three axis
accelerometers what we call those, and those are that those
are the popular ones and in all of the new
devices coming out these days. Yeah, and it's also the
kind of stuff you find in things like video game controllers. Uh.
(17:27):
And it's some of them you hear about six axis,
which is really just getting more specifically precise. Um. Yeah,
and so this will detect those changes in motion and
be able to translate that into again meaningful data once
you run those raw numbers through whatever software you've got. Uh.
So those are your two basic ways of detecting motion
(17:49):
from a purely like this device is moving kind of perspective.
There are other things that will also detect motion, which
we'll talk about as well in a little bit. Before
I get to that, though, I do need to say
there's a couple of are things that are important about accelerometers.
One is that sensitivity of an accelerometer is extremely important.
The more sensitive and accelerometer is, then the more it
(18:10):
will generate a larger charge in our larger change in
signal rather for a given change and acceleration compared to
a less sensitive chip. So these bigger changes are easier
to measure, and that gives the device a better idea
of the actual changes in acceleration. So, in other words,
if you if you make it so that these changes
(18:30):
are are huge, uh, it can really narrow down the
parameters of what that change means, and it can be
more precise in thinking this is more likely an actual
step versus someone just bump their knee on their desk
and went out, yeah, yeah, that the technology is getting
a lot better at um weeding out those false positives exactly.
And then there are other things you've got to keep
(18:52):
in mind, like what's the maximum swing of your accelerometer
that's telling you how much force it can measure or
how much of a change in nextceleration it can measure. Uh,
this is really more important if you are designing something
that moves really really fast and comes to really fast
stops like a jet, not so much with a person,
because while you feel you might be fast compared to
(19:13):
other stuff, you're really slow less less fast than the jet.
And then you have bandwidth, which is how many times
a second you can take a reliable acceleration reading. Uh.
And we don't need anything too precise for human activity
because again we're not moving that quickly. But these are
things that are important in accelerometers in general. Uh. We've
got a lot more to talk about as far as
(19:33):
the sensors go within this these uh, these activity trackers.
But before we get into that, let's take a quick
moment to thank our sponsor. Alright, we're back. So, so
we've talked about accelerometers and photometers, there is one other
way the device can track whether or not you've moved around, right,
Because accelerometers are really great fear for example, on a treadmill, Yeah,
fantastic because it doesn't have to track your location. It
(19:56):
just has to track what you are doing. But if
you have a EPs receiver in your activity tracker, and
some of them do with them, you can actually track
where you are in relation to I don't know anything
else on the planet. But these are not so useful
if you're just running on a treadmill. No, but but
they are very much more accurate for calculating the distance
(20:17):
that you have gone, right. Yeah. So GPS in general,
this Global Positioning system, Uh, what what's going on is
You've got the satellites that are beaming down information here
to the planet and network of twenty four of them. Yeah,
so your GPS receiver receives this these signals from the
various satellites. Now, each satellite is sending its own unique
(20:38):
signal down that has essentially a time stamp on it, right,
and they're all synchronized. Right, So you're getting these different
signals all at the same time from at least usually
at least three satellites. Four works best, four works best,
and and so your device gets these different signals from
these different satellites, and by measuring how long it took
the signal from each satellite to get to that uh,
(21:01):
that device it just compares that against its own its
own little internal clock. It can tell you where you
are in the surface of the Earth. Technically you could
be in one of two places, but that second places
inside the earth, So we pretty much just say that's
not it cuts that right out. Yeah, and that this
was originally military technology, I believe in the seventies and nineties,
(21:26):
in fact, when when we first started getting consumer access
to the Global Positioning System, Uh, the accuracy of that
system for consumers was limited on purpose, right, Yeah. They
they put limitters into the devices to say like, yeah,
we don't really want you to know this. Then we
can say you are somewhere within feet here is here ish.
(21:48):
But now they're very, very accurate. That's eventually gotten to
the point where, uh, you know, it's it's just the
way technology works accurate. Yeah. Yeah, So the GPS receiver
will act where you are by by taking all this
information from the satellites and running that through its own
algorithm and then determining what your location is on the Earth.
(22:09):
And that way you can do something like, uh, if
you jog a specific path and you really liked it,
you can plot it against a map and share it
with other people. Or you can just you know, see
how far you went based upon some mapping program. It
may be that you could compare how far you went
based from the map compared to whatever the activity tracker says.
(22:30):
Because some of these have multiple sensors in them, right,
some of them might have a pedometer or some other
um means of saying this is how many steps you
took and use these in conjunction to Yeah, and it's
funny because I've seen somewhere they do both. They have
the GPS tracker and they have the pedometer part where
it tells you how far you went based upon how
many steps you took, and you can compare the two
(22:51):
to see how accurate the pedometer is, and in some
cases it's not so accurate. That's why reading reviews is
really important because you might you might say, well, if
I by the predometer, it says I ran four point
five miles, but when I look at the map it
says two miles. So yeah, that is a that is
a large difference. Yeah, there there was actually a review
I saw that specifically said that. Okay, so those are
(23:12):
all the various kinds of sensors and technologies that might
be an activity tracker to motion that you moving around,
but there are other sensors to right, Yeah, there's a
whole bunch of them. Um. And these these are all
the physiological sensors that are going to track things like
your sweat and your heart rate. And there's been a
bunch of different things over the years that have that
(23:34):
have contributed to this. The original heart rate monitor, of course,
was the electro cardiogram a k a. The e c
G or e kg UM and that was using electrical
pickups in an amplifier circuit that would detect the hearts
electrical impulses through your skin. Um. And you know, when
when your heart beats, it the way that it does
it is it generates these pulses, It sends a signal
(23:56):
out over the nerve pathways on the surface of the
heart that caused the muscle to contract during each heartbeat.
And by picking up those electrical signals, you can you
can track your heartbeat, which is really groovy for um,
for knowing how hard your body is working, right, because
I mean, there's there are a lot of things that
are important when you're exercising, right. It's not just how
much activity you're doing, how many calories you're burning. If
(24:18):
you want to have really good cardio workouts, if you
want to have a good aerobic workout, then you need
to get to have your heart beating and within a
certain range for a certain amount of time, right. Uh.
And and that's I'll get into that a little bit
more and in the moment, but uh, e c G
s are a little bit more clunky. Um. Usually they
work with a chest strap that many runners, especially because
(24:41):
they're they're they're bouncing around, moving a lot, found very
uncomfortable to wear. UM. And So a new technology that
has come out and has become the standard in noninvasive
heart rate sensor sensory m has been the photo platesmograph
a k A. The PPG, which may or may not
be called an optical heart sensor for people who don't
(25:03):
even want to mess with that entire word. Gotcha, Well, yeah,
photo would tell me that there's light that's playing a
role in this somehow. Yes, PPGs bounce light and most
cases from an l ED in terms of fitness trackers,
because LEDs are cool bulbs that will not you know,
burn your skin, burn your skin, which is cool. Um Uh.
They bounce light through your skin and back to a
(25:24):
sensor and measure the volume of blood moving through your capillaries.
And the way this works is that blood absorbs more
light than it's surrounding tissue. So the less light that
comes back to the sensor, the greater the volume of
blood is moving through those capillaries at the time. UM.
And and this this volume pulses with each heartbeat and
so by tracking those pulses, a PPG tracks your heart
(25:47):
rate at rest and during exercise. That's really cool. So
this is the same sort of thing you get when
you go into a doctor's office and they have like
the little finger clamp thing that ends and it uses
it shines a light onto your fingertip. That is exactly
what that is. UM. And these these days they have
become they're they're they're getting a little bit more sensitive
and UH. And most of them will come in watch
(26:08):
format and it will be right against the inside of
your wrist. But you know there they can they can
be thrown off by the movement of your skin and muscles. UM,
which happens during workouts pretty frequently in light I would imagine,
can also cause problems. So some models are pairing a
PPG with an accelerometer, sometimes a devoted accelerometer, in order
to compensate for your body's movement. Cool and UH also
(26:33):
also an interesting point, not entirely relevant fitness trackers, but
I thought that this was so cool. PPG works differently
with different wavelengths of light, and so in laboratory and
hospital situations, infrared radiation can sometimes be used to assess
blood volume in deep tissue, whereas light in the visible
range is used in smaller, more commercial devices like these
(26:54):
fitness trackers. Oh excellent, awesome, So what else? Okay, so
we've got we've got various ways of tracking the how
hard or how quickly your heart is beating. We've got
the idea of position. Are there other ones as well?
Another great thing to figure out how much you're exerting
yourself is the galvanic skin response censor, which is a
really fancy way of saying, how much are you sweating
(27:16):
right now? Um? It attracts your perspiration by measuring the
conductivity of your skin. Um, because your skin is a
pretty good conductor of of of electricity to begin with,
but when it's wet a k a. When you're sweating,
it's an even better conductor. So um, so yeah. The
the the amount that you're perspiring relates to how much
(27:37):
you're exerting yourself, and so by tracking this this conductivity,
you can track your exertion. Another great way is through thermometers,
good old thermometers um, sometimes infra red, sometimes heat flux,
which just detecting the increase in temperature on you on
the surface of your skin. Right, yeah, as well as
(27:57):
I assume there has to be one to detect ambient
to perature as well. It's usually two paired thermometers. Yeah,
one tracking your body temperature exactly, one tracking the ambient temperature.
Because you're a higher body temperature means that you're working harder,
and you'd also be working harder in a colder ambient temperature. Gotcha, gotcha,
as opposed to it's just plain hot, right exactly right,
(28:19):
all right. So these are various trackers and sensors that
you can find in a lot of the activity trackers
that are out there. There are other ones as well.
Some of them are much more specific, and when you
get down to things like, well how does it track
your sleep? Well, that's usually things you know, tracking the
changes in motion. Again, it's usually the accelerometer. If it
has something that tracks your heart rate, it will be
(28:40):
tracking your heart rate. Yeah, but it's basically it's usually
how much you're wiggling around. Yeah. Yeah, So so if
you you know, it'll that's all when you plug in
this device, when you sink sink it with whatever, whether
it's an app or it's your computer, uh, and you
get the data back saying you had a really good
night's sleep, and maybe because you took it off and
set it down next to you instead of or it. Um.
(29:01):
So yeah, I mean these are these are the basic
ways that gathers information. Now. The way it processes information
is different from one company to the next. It's all
various proprietary softwares and algorithms that take this, crunch the data,
and turn it into stuff that makes sense to us. Yeah,
some of them have really great onboard computers for doing that. Um,
it's very tiny onboard computers for doing that to to
(29:23):
give you a little bit of a live output, and
some of them give you zero live output other than
maybe a little blinking led or something like that. Right,
I had a body media fit, for example, and that
did not have its own screen. Rather, it would you
would have to sink that either to an app via Bluetooth,
or you would sink it to your computer via a
USB cable, and then you could make sense of what
(29:45):
information had been collecting. But you couldn't even tell what
it had been collecting until you did that. Right, There
was no uh screen indicators, so you couldn't read it
at a moment's notice unless you have to have your
phone they're paired with it, in which case you could
pull up the app and take a look that way. Um,
but yeah, there are other devices that have a dedicate screen,
so it's going to give you at least some information,
if not everything. And you know, it's again that depends
(30:07):
very highly on your personal preference and how much information
you need at the moment and how much you just
kind of want to check up on it later. Yeah,
And and some of these will give you information that's
in uh, very kind of concrete terms in the sense
of this is how far you walked, or this is
how how much activity your heart has had today. You know,
how how how often were you in that perfect zone
(30:29):
when you were working out versus you weren't quite pushing
yourself as hard as you needed to, or maybe you
were pushing yourself too hard you need to pull back off.
Some of them are a little more vague, like so
Nike's fuel Band, for example, everything's in fuel points and
and I know that the fuel band is very popular.
(30:50):
It's a gorgeous device, looks very full disclosure. My wife
has one. She loves it. She and she has the
app that it's paired up with her iPhone. So she
can see what's going on, but it's doing everything in
fuel points, and some people have said, some critics have
said that that makes it less useful because you don't
(31:12):
know what they mean necessarily. I think, well, you know,
it always reminds me of Microsoft Points and how you're
kind of sort of tricking the system in order to
make it a little bit more of a game and
less of a reality, which helps lots of people actually,
because because a lot of people don't want to know
how many steps they've taken. They're like, oh, that was
a lot of I wasted so much time getting fit yesterday.
(31:34):
Why did I do that? But if you get fuel points,
then you get especially especially if it has a gamification
element to it, where you are measuring your own activity
versus the activity of other people. If you set your
if you have a way of setting a specific goal
using one of these trackers, and the tracker can keep
track of that so that it will tell you, Hey,
you met your goal today. That's a reward system, right
(31:56):
you You immediately get that reward, that that sense of
satisfact and that you have met your goal for that day.
Then you have the added sasfaction. If there's a gamification
level there beyond just just getting the badge for yourself.
If you can share that badge with your friends and say, hey, guys,
check what I did. Did you do it? You didn't
do it? Stuck up right. Yeah. So if you're all
(32:16):
using like fitbits, for example, I know people who are
using fitbits as a way of challenging each other to
see how many steps they could take. Uh, and they would.
You know, there'd be groups of friends who were trying
to walk out walk each other, which is great. I mean,
you know, yeah, if that gives you the motivation to
get exercise, that's great. You know, there's there's nothing wrong
(32:37):
with using the desire to rub your friends faces and
your achievements in order for you to get fit, as
long as you, you know, practice some restraint a little
bit hytically, I can tell you that a punch to
the face is not good for your physical fitness. But yeah, so,
and there are other levels of a gamification to There's
some devices out there that have games built into the
(32:59):
software of the device or on the computer that you play,
so that as you use the device, as you move around,
you generate like online currency to play in a little
online game to Strive has that there's a little online
game where you can as you walk around, you generate coins,
and using those coins you can buy stuff in the
game world of a little bit like Sonics rings or
(33:21):
something like that. Yeah, like Conville, but using this you
generate the currency just by moving around, so that's the incentive. Yeah,
or um. An office favorite for a while was a
Zombie Run I think is the name of the app?
Which which which? I think it's run Zombie Run something
like that, something like that. Yes, that that gave you.
It was hooked up to a GPS related system on
(33:43):
your cell phone, and I would would give you these
little like are you out running the zombies or are
you totally dying? Right? Yeah? I I used to have.
In fact, I had the beta version of that app
back when it came out in the beta form for Android,
and the way I don't know if it still works
this way. I haven't used the app in a long time,
but the way it originally worked was that you would
be somewhere and you would tell it where you wanted
(34:03):
to go. You would open up a map program and
this zombie app and say, all right, here's you know
based on my GPS location, this is where I am,
this is where I want to go. It would then
generate these virtual zombies on the map that could actually move,
so the little blips would start moving toward you, and
your goal was to get to your destination without being
intercepted by one of those little zombie blips. So you
(34:25):
might have to find a different route than the one
you had intended, and you may have to book it,
and yeah, yeah, you might have to. You might have
to speed up and slow down, which in running terms
is is actually really great for training. So and there
were also, as I recall, there were story elements to
that game as well that that were added in later.
I had it where it was just the game mechanic,
but I know, and it may not even be that
(34:46):
app It maybe a similar one, because there were a
few that came out that had the same sort of theme.
But there was one where there was an overall progressive
storyline and as you participated, you would unlock more of
the story. I got eaten. I couldn't get from I
couldn't get from the train station to my house because
there was really there was only one way you could
(35:07):
go by foot, and it kept wanting me to cut
through the woods. I kept wanting to not run into
barbed wire fences that are hard to see. Look, if
you don't bring your bolt cutters to the zombie apocalypse,
then I don't think you're going to get very far.
And I'm no longer allowed to bring my bolt cutters
to work. That was the problem, right, because this was
my commute back home, and so I already had that
(35:28):
limitation set on me. I tell you, you make one
silly mistake with a with an internet line and they
just never let you forget it. It's crazy. We're very
unforgiving here and how stuff works. But the game of
vacation obviously plays a big part. Yeah, and you know
it's it's the recommended target number of steps per day
for for healthy human people is about ten thousand and
(35:50):
um and that's that equals out to maybe about five
miles and uh and and yeah, so anything that helps
people get to that. And and in fact, Dina Bravada,
the person I mentioned at the top of the podcast,
who you know, she's she's a specialist in in health
matters and has expressed some skeptic skepticism as to whether
or not these activity trackers are really you know, a
(36:11):
huge benefit. I mean, they helped the people who are
already interested. But she did notice she did a study
or she was part of the study where uh they
gave pedometers to a group of participants, UH in a
randomized trial where some some participants didn't get a podometer,
some did, and they were all asked to uh kind
of track their activities. And it turned out that the
(36:32):
people who had the pedometers increased their physical activity by
about two thousand three steps per day over the baseline.
And uh and so that ended up being a twenty
seven percent increase in physical activity. And that's provided said, well,
that's significant. So if you have, if you're actually using
one of these things and you're paying attention to it,
(36:54):
then you are more likely to actually engage in more
physical activity and thus exercise more and be have a
healthier lifestyle. Um. And that's that's the chief argument for
these activity trackers is the idea that with this information
you can really be more mindful of what you are
doing and how it's affecting you. A lot of these
(37:15):
activity trackers come with software that also have as part
of it a way of keeping a a food journal,
which is also very important because you could be exercising,
but if you're not eating well, then that's not gonna
help you. You can be sabotaging yourself certainly. So for example,
the body media fit device I had, uh part of
(37:35):
the software that you would have once you had to
subscribe to it. So you you'd have to buy the
device and you had to subscribe to the service. But
once you subscribe to the service, you could track your meals.
And every meal you would track, it would tell you
how many calories you've consumed. It would break it down
by what type of calories they were, etcetera. And then
the the information from the device would tell you how
(37:56):
many calories you would burned. And so that would give
you an idea like did I burn more reason I consumed?
If I did, then I'm on the road to losing weight.
I mean that's a that's a very basic way of
figuring it out, calories out. But uh, it also meant
that you were much more mindful when you started doing
things like you sat down for a meal. You'd think, oh,
wait a minute, you know, if I want to if
I want to be on track and I don't want
(38:17):
to have to go home and run five miles. I
probably shouldn't pig out on that deep fried onion, even
though it's super tasty. Now, there is a flip side
to this coin, of course, we're talking all about keeping
all this data and really looking at and making something meaningful. Uh,
there can come a point where too much data is
actually harmful, where you're just you're just overwhelmed by all
(38:40):
the information and you can't really see a way of
using it in a in a way that makes sense.
That can happen. I don't know that most I think
most activity trackers are pretty good where you're not going
to get that much unless you're really digging down and
you want to see. Oh, no, I want to I
want this in pie chart form. No, I wanted in
line graph form. But that is one of those things
(39:00):
that we're going to be looking into later in a
in a later episode of tech Stuff. We've already planned
on recording this. We haven't recorded it yet, but we
want to do an episode where we're talking about kind
of that anxiety you get when you have so much
information that you know, you start to think, is my
life being boiled down to data points and charts? Yeah,
and how much of that is healthy, and you know,
(39:20):
it's it's yeah, whether whether or not it's okay that
we know so much about ourselves at any given second. Yeah,
I've I know more about me than I'm comfortable with.
But uh, and that's for a later episode. And I
really do think that most of these physical activity trackers
aren't quite at that level. It is a little interesting
to you know, sit there and say, oh, look at
my sleep patterns. What can I do to make these better? Uh,
(39:43):
there's really only so much you can do. And you know,
you can try and make sure that the environment you're
in is conducive to sleep and rest, but there are
a lot of little things that you can that you
can work on that that a lot of people might
not be completely aware of. Um. And and again a
lot of this is just about awareness. And along those lines, um,
(40:03):
you know, these these fitness trackers that we were talking
about can run from fifty fifty dollars on the low end,
I guess, you know, ten dollars for up to two
for some of the super fancy ones, or or even
more for the really high level performance triathlon kind of things.
So there's a huge I mean or down to free
apps that you can download for your smartphone right, which
is mostly using GPS tracking to figure out how far
(40:26):
you've gone exactly, keeping in mind that that's not necessarily
going to translate into a very accurate measure of how
much how many calories you burn, but you at least
give you an idea of how far you went. Uh,
you know, it's It's definitely something that I've been interested
in the past. And you know, we're about to do
this exercise thing here at work where we all have pedometers,
(40:46):
so I'm sure we're gonna I'm in a group with
Holly Fry, who is a marathon runner, so I know
my group is going to do really well. Yeah, so
I don't plan on moving for most of July. Uh,
that's the spirit. But but you know, it really depends
on what you want the device for, how you're going
(41:06):
to use it, and also, like we said, read reviews,
because some of the ones that are really expensive may
not have all the features you want and may not
perform better than than less right, and they might just
be you know, for a different subset of human person
than than you happen to be and not yea, not
all of these are for everybody. If I may make
a personal recommendation. D C. Rainmaker has a blog that
(41:29):
is brilliant. He's a triathlon runner, but um our triathlon
athlete who who's just triathlete, Yes, that would be that
would be the technical term for that. Who has just
reviewed all of the devices, all of them, all of them,
and and and he gets very highly technical, which I love,
(41:50):
um and but but also tends to put his his
kind of final thoughts in an extremely succinct package. Excellent, excellent,
good recommendation. Yeah, uh, and you know again, take a look,
find out what's going to work right, work well for you.
You know, if if you have one that's going to
sync up with a smartphone, make sure that it's compatible
with which you with your smartphone. Make sure that your
(42:11):
smartphone has the type of Bluetooth that the device wants
to sync up with, because that can be very very messy. Right.
You can say, well, it was supposed to work with
an iOS device, and technically this iPhone three G is
an iOS device, but you know, yeah, that's obviously something
you want to make sure is all all working before
you you dive in. But uh, yeah, I think these
(42:33):
are really interesting devices. I've seen some great implementations. I've
seen some gorgeous designs. The body media fit thing I
had worked really well for me. Um, I haven't been
using it for a while, but uh it's you know,
it was definitely an interesting thing that that you wear
it all the time except when you're going to get wet,
and uh so that was kind of interesting the idea
(42:54):
that this became a part of me for for several months.
And I did lose weight because I was very my
full about my activity and what I was eating, and um,
you know, I should really get back into it. But uh,
not that I've gained a lot of weight. But could
you stand to lose a few more pounds anyone who's
watched forward thinking we would do. But anyway, everyone everyone
(43:15):
can stand to be a little bit more said. Probably
probably so, Guys, if you have any suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff. You've got some question about a
type of device, or a company or a person in tech,
or just a concept that you want to know more
about that's technologically relevant, please let us know. You can
get in touch with us by email our addresses tech
(43:37):
Stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line
on Facebook or Twitter. You can find us there. We
have to handle tech stuff. HS double and Lauren and
I will talk to you again really soon for more
on this and bathans of other topics because it has
to have work dot Com. This is a kid che
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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