Wellness and technology, the quantified self movement

A fitness tracker that actually looks kind of normal http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-09/05/withings-activite-smartwatch

https://medium.com/backchannel/the-full-disclosure-future-ff680cd2367d

^ Interesting.

But $350/month for healthcare. Thank fuck I moved back from the US.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.fitness&hl=en

MS Band anyone?

Just reading this, I wonder how long before some enterprising worker ships a tracker to someone in India and pays them to wear it and be active

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fitness-trackers-are-everywhere-but-do-they-work/?WT.mc_id=SA_Twitter

Are there any movement trackers that can be set to vibrate to alert you to get off your fat arse and walk around every x minutes?

Polar M400 and Pivotal tracker bands both have inactivity alerts. iPhone definitely has one, I'd be surprised if Android didn't.

There's a heroku library that you can hook a fitbit up to that will send you a text message to stop slobbing about ( https://www.reddit.com/r/fitbit/comments/31jecl/fitminder_an_idle_alert_for_your_fitbit/ ) - probably other trackers have similar libs available.

Seems a bit odd that the majority of trackers don't have this by default as it must be a reasonably common thing for people to want and not exactly difficult to implement.

The Garmin ones do that (Vivosmart I think it's called).

This has an inactivity alarm thing like the Garmin
https://jawbone.com/up

Are any of these any use without a phone? I don't really want it connected to Bluetooth all the time and don't need it reporting my movements back to the evil company overlords.

iFit Active too
http://walking.about.com/od/Computer-Linked-Pedometers/tp/Sitting-Time-Apps-And-Inactivity-Monitors.htm

"we should move for two minutes after each 20 minutes of sitting"

FitBit
"The other Fitbit activity monitor models (except the Zip) feature a vibrating alarm. You can set multiple alarms to go off throughout the day. You can choose to set them as a reminder to take an active break, such as by setting them to go off sequentially every 30 minutes all day."

But: https://www.facebook.com/fitbit/posts/551918854832303
"None of the Fitbit trackers have an "idle alarm", but the Zip might make faces at you if you're sitting still for a while. You can set alarms to vibrate at a specific time on the Fitbit One."

I've now got a Vivosmart. So far, it doesn't do much.

I've been wearing one of these for a year or so: love it. Through work I've had to try most on the market, but I like this one purely because it's unobtrusive. It just looks like a nice watch.

My partner has expressed an interest in the jawbone fitness tracker (the latest one). Are they any good ?

I did wear a Jawbone UP24 for a while - integration with the iPhone was superb and the summary/SmartCoach pages were useful. I had it buzzing every two hours during the working day to prompt me to fill my water up again and had it warn me if I'd been idle for half an hour to get me up and out my seat. I did feel a bit more refreshed after using the 'smart sleep' alarm to wake you in the morning, but that could well be a placebo effect.

Unfortunately it borked after about six months. The retailer had no replacements in stock so I took my money back as a refund (£105) - had every intention of replacing it but never got round to it.

The Pebble Time I've since got will, in theory, be a suitable replacement but it's not there yet.

In short, for what it does the Jawbone is a superb bit of kit. It'd be nice if it had a watch display on it - I did miss that (felt weird wearing it and a watch so abandoned the watch).

An alternative would be the Fitbit Surge: https://www.fitbit.com/uk/surge

Said Vivosmart is now dead. Just stopped turning on. Garmin support time...

I keep really wanting a Garmin Fenix 3 Sapphire.

It's freaking beautiful.

But.. Garmin Connect on Android... the reviews are appalling, hardly ever connecting, let alone syncing, not pushing basic data into Google Fit, custom apps that are kinda crappy, limited support for other apps, bizarre Garmin > Connect > Strava > other things data pipelines to get basic scenarios working.

I really want a great smart watch, that is great at the fitness tracking more than anything else. Effectively a Garmin Fenix or Suunto watch, that either runs Android Wear or at least can talk to Android reliably.

Liking the steps/sleep/movement stuff on the Garmin Forerunner 920xt (tri-wannabe) and only had a few problems with syncing to iPhone (via Bluetooth, it's much better syncing directly with the Internet via Wifi).

Movement warnings are good and get me up and walking (although I have to do laps of my flat if working from home) but I've started using this as a reason to tidy up things rather than wandering aimlessly.

Mind you, a version (maybe the 935xt if they ever produce it) with wrist based optical HR (so it can monitor HR throughout the day) would be interesting. An HR strap would then only be needed for swimming (maybe, depends how well they can make the optical HR work in water) and if you want the fancy running dynamics data.

Garmin software in 'is shit' shocker?!

Anyone got a Fitbit Surge? If so, would you recommend?

So I'm dredging this thread for a quick review of the Xiaomi Miband 1S.

I bought it from amazon for £18 or so, it's the model with optical heart rate monitoring. I've been wearing it constantly since Monday and here's what I've found:

The band is good quality, the little unit is as well. The HR tracking seems (for the most part) pretty accurate. It's got a little vibrating thing in there to buzz for app notifications, alarms and so forth.

The official Mifit app is pretty crap. I can use the app to count my steps, track my sleep and measure my heart rate. I can also set three alarms which'll get saved on the thing itself and will work without being connected to Bluetooth.

There's a few problems with it. The step-counting is way off, I read that it used to be ok and a recent software update has broken it a bit. Being worn on the wrist it seems to think typing and basically any other movement is a step. The heart rate tracking is pretty badly implemented. You can check it when you like and apparently it tracks your HR during sleep. However, it doesn't seem to do much with the heart rate. It can't save HR data on the device, so it has to be actively connected to BT to do HR. It'll hold onto the step tracking data until you connect, so you don't need a permanent connection.

I'm not sure how the sleep tracking works, but it reckons it knows a) how long I'm sleeping for and b) how much of that is deep sleep. Don't know how accurate that is, but seems fairly reasonable thus far.

What really saves this device is a 3rd party app called Mi Band Tools. This app allows you to do periodic or constant HR tracking (set your own intervals between HR datapoints), you can set it to only take HR between certain times or turn constant tracking on or off.

You can also set a smart alarm which'll wake you up to half an hour early if it detects you're in the right bit of your sleep cycle. It does app notifications and so forth but I haven't messed around with that side of things.

I've got it set to take HR every minute throughout the day. Still got 63% battery on the band.

I tried linking Mi Fit, Mi Band Tools and Strava to Google Fit. Problem was, the mi fit app was overruling strava, adding loads of steps and telling Fit that I was going on very long walks instead of cycling and so forth.

I've now got it set up with Google Fit counting my steps using my phone (much more accurate than the band), Mi Band Tools linked to Google Fit giving it my HR and Strava giving Google Fit the GPS tracks of my rides.

Overall, it's worth the money if you're willing to splash out another £1.39 on Mi Band Tools and you want a cheap HR band and something that'll work as an alarm and for app notifications. The step counting isn't particularly accurate and the official app is crap. The hardware though, is pretty good.

Hope you enjoyed my CSB :)

Was the Mifit app the one that was leaking every last bit of data it could get from your phone back to a server in China?

Couldn't possibly say... I'll look into it! I wonder what they'll do with my heart rate and vastly inflated step count?

Actually, just had a quick Google, looks like about 10 months ago people were finding it was using a lot of data. I've got all the permissions set to always ask in cm13 and it's used about 3Mb of data since Monday.

Edit: looks like that might've been with a tweaked community created version of the official app.

Edit 2: They're all at it, apparently.