4 ms·

Yeah, except... Who wants to be the guinea pig here? There is a difference between "oh, I did 7000 steps instead of 6000" and "oh my blood pressure is 200/90 in

• gumby 7y ago
  There are four different scales here. One is the current generation of sleep trackers or Bluetooth toothbrushes (I own both, just for curiosity’s sake and amusement) which at best tell you only what you already know, and often not even that. Next is the coarse 6K/7k step case you talk about. The measurements on the gym’s treadmills are similarly arbitrary. That kind of gamification is useful to get people moving and as you say accuracy isn’t important. Next is the gross trend...if you’re in a pattern and deviate then it could be a sign of something and could be that you put the device on loosely or that it is dirty. Which is the last kind: even though I have the watch i still use a pressure cuff, though not often, and even occasionally exercise with a heart rate monitor and even a pressure cuff. They suffer from the worst sort of measurement problem: inconvenience. Just as “the best camera you have is the one with you” the same applies to health monitoring. As for the importance of health monitoring...how often do you look at your poo? Even in Germany where many toilets are equipped with a “shelf” for inspection, an informal (and amusing) survey I conducted revealed that most people never looked even when they weren’t feeling well.
  • arpa 7y ago
    The shelf is, in fact, to save you from water splashing your cheeks, not for inspecting...
  • WorldMaker 7y ago
    > Next is the coarse 6K/7k step case you talk about. The measurements on the gym’s treadmills are similarly arbitrary. That kind of gamification is useful to get people moving and as you say accuracy isn’t important. I wish the industry had converged on a more abstract metric name than "steps". Just as I shudder at how many fitness trackers now have been moving to metrics called "calories" or "active calories", which seems like an over-correction away from "steps" to a more dangerous alternative. They imply a physical specificity that isn't that clear cut a direct correlation. > Just as “the best camera you have is the one with you” the same applies to health monitoring. This does seem to generally be the case. Where most people never bother to check their blood pressure at all, even a false positive is more awareness of their health and its implications/consequences than they likely had before. So long as warnings are (as they usually must be, given laws and liabilities) highly couched in the usual disclaimers to seek further medical advice. It's amazing what data we are slowly accumulating from our wrist-based tricorders, even if this is all still very early days in figuring out how useful any of it is, how accurate we can get any of it.
    • gumby 7y ago
      At least "steps" are understandable, and the data are roughly correlated. It could be a lot worse: I own several sleeping bags for winter backpacking. Each has been variously rated by its manufacturer as 10 C, -10 C, -30 C etc. There is no standard for this and in fact there is no correlation with performance: the best one for really cold conditions is rated -10 C. I think Fitbit and Apple at least tried to have the number of steps taken by an "average" user registered as about the same number all the time.
      • WorldMaker 7y ago
        > At least "steps" are understandable, and the data are roughly correlated. The point though is that it is very rough, and they may as well have always been called "fitpoints" or "beans" or "gimmicks" for what good it does calling them "steps", especially because of that confusion both inside the industry and out that A) devices have moved from being directly pedometers at the foot to being indirectly pedometers at the waist or now the wrist, and more critically B) that they were always meant to be more of an overall aggregate activity score and the one specific physical action of a "step" never the end goal in measuring the metric anyway (it was just the easiest metric to measure in the early days of pedometers, and being called "steps" as much a historic throwback than an accurate name even in the early days of pedometers). Whether or not the metric is consistent today, it's at least somewhat in one direction or another inconsistent to call it a "step" and an abstract name would have been more fun and also likely avoid more confusion than the "rough correlation" suggested today.