Thinking of getting a loved one a fitness tracker this Christmas? You might want to read on this first. According to this article published in the New York Times, adults who meet the physical activity recommendation of 150 minutes per week are less likely to die prematurely from cardiovascular diseases than their counterparts who do not meet those requirements.
This information is based of a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, where researchers compared the activity tracker results with self-reports of 4,000 middle-aged men and women who wore fitness monitors for a week. The study then followed the participants up to 10 years, checking their names against those in the National Death Registry to determine whether objectively meeting the 150-minute per week guideline affected how long people lived. According to the results of the study, moderate and moderate to vigorous physical activity from the trackers were generally associated with lower all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality. The published article however failed to mention the limitation of the study. The fitness tracker was only worn for a week, which might be too short of a time to reflect long-patterns of behavior. The fitness tracker also undercounted some activities such as weight lifting thus likely classifying motionless standing as sedentary behavior.
The article goes further and cites another study carried out in Singapore where 800 office workers were given activity trackers and asked to meet certain goals. The workers were divided into groups where some received cash to reach those goals, another earning money for their favorite charity, and the last group was told to meet the targets simply because it was a good for their health. At a six months follow up, those who received cash exercised the least while those who did it for their own good were exercising more now than at the last check. The study however did not find any evidence of improvements in health outcomes across the different groups. This definitely calls into question the value of these devices for health promotion.
Even with insufficient evidence to make a proper claim of the impact of fitness trackers, the studies do show that activity monitors have the potential to influence how long and well we live through physical activity. Generally, physical activity has been shown to have benefits especially ones related to cardiovascular diseases. Health practitioners can use this studies and still recommend the use of fitness trackers to help clients monitor their physical activity, as long as they also advise the clients to not only depend on the fitness tracker as a measure of their health.