Yahoo News 5 best new health and fitness trackers
In the future even amateurs will know everything about how their body works (or doesn’t). The wearables revolution has been in full swing for several years now, but the offerings are growing more sophisticated with every new launch — offering a more detailed picture of our health.
Calorie or step-counting feel redundant when we can track body composition and work out the impact of our sleep cycles on our overall health. Some of them even make it fun to do so (almost).
These are the next-gen trackers you need to ensure you’re fighting fit for the future.
1. Fitbit Sleepstages
USP: expert intervention
Fitbit has honed its hardware offerings, and is pausing to focus on software: Sleepstages is a new programme that makes a forensic analysis of every toss and turn.
The software was developed over two years with scientists from Stanford and Johns Hopkins University, and was tested on volunteers during the development stage. It will be presented at Sleep 2017 in April, which bills itself as “the leading meeting for sleep scientists and clinicians”.
What does this mean for the everyday user? The software uses accelerometer and heart-rate data collected from your Fitbit wearable and then estimates the time you spend in each sleep stage (light, deep, REM and awake). It correlates the stages with your waking behaviour to nudge you towards conclusions about how your exercise, diet and weight might affect your sleep (and in turn, enable you to change your behaviour).
It also suggests a sleep schedule to ensure you get the rest you need all week — not just during a stolen Saturday morning lie-in.
Free, fitbit.com
2. TomTom Touch
USP: track your body composition
The calorie can feel like a rather redundant unit. One man’s calorie is not the same as another’s, moreover, monitoring them can feel like a slow march towards the death of the soul. Also, calorie input and expenditure has no bearing on your overall fitness — which is what actually matters.
TomTom has devised a new methodology: its Touch tracker measures body fat and muscle mass to determine whether your workout is working. It’s the first tracker to do so, and does it without any complicated or invasive procedures: you simply touch your finger on its face for 10 seconds and it performs the analysis, and graphs the breakdown.
Otherwise, it has all the other usual tracking capabilities — including heart-rate, step count and a clean, organised app for monitoring your progress.
£130, tomtom.com
3. Samsung Gear Fit2
USP: no need to pair your smartphone
Samsung’s Gear Fit2 is precocious. You don’t have to tell it what type of exercise you’re doing — it guesses using sophisticated sensors — and you don’t have to pair it with the crutch of a smartphone: it just gets on with it independently. It’s ideal for those who prefer to compartmentalise their technology to get a bit of peace and quiet (and would rather save the gigabytes of storage).
If you do choose to pair it, you’ll have access to deeper data — but the choice is entirely yours. On the band’s interface it indicates the range and intensity of your activity throughout the day. It also has an inactivity timer to guilt trip you into getting up.
£179, samsung.com
4. Cyclemeter
USP: gamify your cycle commute
Cyclists are competitive. Poised in the peloton at Holborn, they side-eye each other, calculating how exactly to pull away and leave a competitor in the dust. However, racing is often foiled by traffic lights, or pedestrians floating into the road unthinkingly — precipitating an emergency stop and a bad-tempered remark (justified, from the cyclist).
Race better by taking it high tech: the Cyclemeter app is a more sophisticated way to work out where you rank among the capital’s fastest free-wheelers.
It’s designed wholeheartedly for lycra anoraks: it incorporates a stopwatch and invites you to map your routes and times, which it then graphs as a bar or pie chart, according to preference, so that you can analyse your progress.
You can record heart-rate, bike speed and cadence. Better still: you can compete against your own workouts — pop in earphones and the app will announce whether you’re ahead or trailing your personal best — and you can import your rides and compare them with other riders’ progress on the same route — so you can compete without taking a tumble. It’s currently only available for iOS, but an Android version is promised very soon.
Free (with in-app purchases), abvio.com/cyclemeter
5. Withings Steel HR
USP: 25-day battery life
Sometimes the best fitness goals are foiled by your activity tracker’s battery life. You start enthusiastically but the third time you forget to charge yours, it takes days before you re-enliven it. The third time, it’s weeks. The fourth, you leave it on the bedside table indefinitely.
Withings’ Steel HR — which was launched at this month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona — has no time for your weakness: its battery lasts up to 25 days, which gives it a better pitch at worming its way into your life (thereby creating the attendant guilt if you don’t recharge it).
Fitness trackers have innovative software but tend to be much of a muchness when it comes to design, so the Steel HR, which has an analogue face and proper, buckled watch band, also has an edge.
£170, withings.com
