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I don't know if I'd trust cheap knockoffs to give me accurate information on my health. Hell I don't even trust expensive health tracking gadgets, I remember wa

I don't know if I'd trust cheap knockoffs to give me accurate information on my health. Hell I don't even trust expensive health tracking gadgets, I remember watching some YouTube videos showing how different watches give you different readings

pandaman 2y ago
This. Mi Band is already junk as far as any data goes. Mine was showing sleep starting hours before going to bed and heart rate was comically wrong from time to time (like in "riding up a 2 mile hill while staying under 80 bpm" wrong).
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Interesting. My Amazfit band seems reasonably accurate to me so far (and it's been years). Certainly nothing comically wrong. I wouldn't count on it to be super-accurate or use it as a medical device, but it seems useful for monitoring trends. Heck, just for counting steps it seems accurate enough and that's really good enough for me. As for the heart rate monitor, any fitness band will probably give you very different results just depending on how tight it is. I wouldn't consider any of them a substitute for a proper heart rate measurement, simply because of where they are on your body.
  - pandaman 2y ago
    I'd imagine a fitness band that cannot even place heart rate into an adjunct zone (e.g. showing zone n-1 or n+1 when in zone n) does not have much use for fitness. Nobody demands measuring every heart beat but, in case it's not obvious, riding uphill places one into the max heart rate zone, which would be 80 only for somebody who is 140 years old or so.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      I can't say whether fitness bands as a technology are all this bad, or only that band, or if the user was simply wearing it wrong, or what. We'd need a large study with many different fitness bands and many different users and also other heart-monitoring devices (chest bands) to accurately determine how accurate different fitness bands, and all fitness bands as a class, are. All I can say is that, for myself, for the cheap price, it's kinda handy for what I use it for (daily step counting, sometimes telling the time so I don't need to pull my phone out of my pocket, checking my sleep quality, etc.). I haven't noticed any wildly and obviously inaccurate data yet. Sometimes I'm not so sure about the sleep data, but it's hard to say because I don't normally remember when I really did go to sleep or wake up, and don't have a way of cross-checking. I'm not about to spend tons of money on some kind of professional sleep study to do this, so the cheap-o band is better than the data I'd get otherwise, which is nothing at all.
      - pandaman 2y ago
        >We'd need a large study with many different fitness bands Well, I don't, it's not like it was the only issue with that - all other functions, not dependent on wearing, would glitch too. Alarms would not go off, workouts would not record, or would not export to Strava (and its own fitness app only shown data in km), it would not go into DND with the phone, or would not get out of it. And it could not filter notifications, which, apparently, Android makes very often: playing radio in the car would be accompanied with constant buzzing informing me what song is playing if I did not put it on DND. I junked the thing and replaced with Garmin, which, apparently, is pretty consistent and can detect even HRV. Even if I had faulty hardware somehow (broken alarm in an electronic watch, which works 95% of the time sounds a bit of a stretch) the accompanying app is obviously buggy and hostile to the users. The sleep monitoring on Garmin is very different from the Mi Band, btw: Mi Band would not detect short wakeups, sleep start was so off that it would start before I went to bed, as I already mentioned, its heartrate during sleep was off Garmin's by ~20%, though not something I'd care about much, and its SpO2 is pretty random at any time so I'd imagine it would not detect sleep apnea if I had one. Also, step count on the Mi Band depends on the hand movement so I'd get 1000 steps in a half an hour on a balance board, Garmin counts much closer to the phone as both track linear movement too so they don't count steps when you're moving your arms while being stationary. It's sure cheap and the form factor is great but it is not a reliable source of any data. I would not even trust its time readings, as far as I can tell it has not glitched on me but I did not have it long enough. There is a reason Garmin manages to sell $1000+ fitness watches despite competition from both cheap bands and Apple's.

pandaman 2y ago

This. Mi Band is already junk as far as any data goes. Mine was showing sleep starting hours before going to bed and heart rate was comically wrong from time to time (like in "riding up a 2 mile hill while staying under 80 bpm" wrong).

shiroiushi 2y ago
Interesting. My Amazfit band seems reasonably accurate to me so far (and it's been years). Certainly nothing comically wrong. I wouldn't count on it to be super-accurate or use it as a medical device, but it seems useful for monitoring trends. Heck, just for counting steps it seems accurate enough and that's really good enough for me. As for the heart rate monitor, any fitness band will probably give you very different results just depending on how tight it is. I wouldn't consider any of them a substitute for a proper heart rate measurement, simply because of where they are on your body.
- pandaman 2y ago
  I'd imagine a fitness band that cannot even place heart rate into an adjunct zone (e.g. showing zone n-1 or n+1 when in zone n) does not have much use for fitness. Nobody demands measuring every heart beat but, in case it's not obvious, riding uphill places one into the max heart rate zone, which would be 80 only for somebody who is 140 years old or so.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    I can't say whether fitness bands as a technology are all this bad, or only that band, or if the user was simply wearing it wrong, or what. We'd need a large study with many different fitness bands and many different users and also other heart-monitoring devices (chest bands) to accurately determine how accurate different fitness bands, and all fitness bands as a class, are. All I can say is that, for myself, for the cheap price, it's kinda handy for what I use it for (daily step counting, sometimes telling the time so I don't need to pull my phone out of my pocket, checking my sleep quality, etc.). I haven't noticed any wildly and obviously inaccurate data yet. Sometimes I'm not so sure about the sleep data, but it's hard to say because I don't normally remember when I really did go to sleep or wake up, and don't have a way of cross-checking. I'm not about to spend tons of money on some kind of professional sleep study to do this, so the cheap-o band is better than the data I'd get otherwise, which is nothing at all.
    - pandaman 2y ago
      >We'd need a large study with many different fitness bands Well, I don't, it's not like it was the only issue with that - all other functions, not dependent on wearing, would glitch too. Alarms would not go off, workouts would not record, or would not export to Strava (and its own fitness app only shown data in km), it would not go into DND with the phone, or would not get out of it. And it could not filter notifications, which, apparently, Android makes very often: playing radio in the car would be accompanied with constant buzzing informing me what song is playing if I did not put it on DND. I junked the thing and replaced with Garmin, which, apparently, is pretty consistent and can detect even HRV. Even if I had faulty hardware somehow (broken alarm in an electronic watch, which works 95% of the time sounds a bit of a stretch) the accompanying app is obviously buggy and hostile to the users. The sleep monitoring on Garmin is very different from the Mi Band, btw: Mi Band would not detect short wakeups, sleep start was so off that it would start before I went to bed, as I already mentioned, its heartrate during sleep was off Garmin's by ~20%, though not something I'd care about much, and its SpO2 is pretty random at any time so I'd imagine it would not detect sleep apnea if I had one. Also, step count on the Mi Band depends on the hand movement so I'd get 1000 steps in a half an hour on a balance board, Garmin counts much closer to the phone as both track linear movement too so they don't count steps when you're moving your arms while being stationary. It's sure cheap and the form factor is great but it is not a reliable source of any data. I would not even trust its time readings, as far as I can tell it has not glitched on me but I did not have it long enough. There is a reason Garmin manages to sell $1000+ fitness watches despite competition from both cheap bands and Apple's.