Fitness Friday

Your Fitness Tracker May Helping You Understand Your Heart, But Not Your Diet

According to a recent study conducted by Stanford University Medical Center found that many fitness trackers get a persons heart rate correct, but are often very wrong about the calories a person has burned during the day.

Have you ever just completed a great work out and been proud of the calories you've just burned according to your fitness tracker? So proud in fact, that you may even have room for a little extra desert because you burned so many calories? Well, according to a new study at Stanford University Medical Center you may have overeaten after that workout. The research team evaluated the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, FitBit Surge, Microsoft Band, MioAlpha2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear 2. The study incorporated 60 participants running on treadmills or riding stationary bicycles, while having their metabolic rate measured using oxygen and carbon dioxide measurements in their breath.

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The study found that six of the devices had a less than 5% error rate when it came to measuring the persons heart rate, but when measuring the persons caloric expenditure the devices were way off. Researchers found that the most accurate device was 27% off, while the least accurate device was off by 93%. The cause for concern in all of this, is that many people use these devices to make medically based decisions. If a persons physician tells them to lose weight, and the person uses one of these fitness devices to measure caloric intake after caloric expenditure, their decisions will have not been made with the right information. Lead researcher Euan Ashley's hope is that this study will push fitness device manufacturers to adhere to stricter standards, much like the standards that medical devices are held to.