Being chased around by your fitness tracker?!

That we are definitively living in a new era of personalised health and medicine is evident from the proliferation of "wearables" on the market and being developed; the most obvious testament to this being the number of people who now carry around a monitoring device in place of their old wristwatch, maybe even replacing an already somewhat passé smartwatch with it. 

The concept of wearing clothes made of materials that can sense and respond to activity, temperature and moisture is no longer new, and specialised materials were credited with the breaking of over 100 world swimming records between 2008 and 2009 alone, for example! But I am referring more specifically to activity trackers, and the role that they are currently playing in our lives, and the potential contribution they make in improving our overall health. 

Now I have been pretty active all my life, and still run on the mountain or around the track (in the stadium that is home to the Montreal Alouettes) four or five times a week, so I don't really need to monitor my activity, right? But it seems that could be wrong! First up, it is pretty true that after a day in the office, then getting home to change and go run, followed by a shower and making dinner, well, it's real easy to spend the remainder of the day pretty immobile in front of the TV and a good documentary.  

That appears to be fairly natural after a day of work and exercise at the end, but a study I heard of actually suggested that sitting is the new smoking, and it was just as dangerous in the physically active as in the proverbial couch potato. The "sitting is the new smoking" idiom was coined by Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic, who also happens to the inventor of the standing desk. He believes that we are "sitting ourselves to death" and that the effects of such behaviour are actually permanent, and cannot be reversed by subsequent return to activity. 

I find that kinda hard to believe, personally, but the message is clear - sitting is a killer - and we need to get off our backsides and move more! There's no clear answer yet, but I would love to know if staying mobile more of the time, even or especially in the absence of vigorous exercise, is actually better for us than working out and then collapsing on the sofa, feeling justified in our end-of-day sloth. If simple movement is king, then can we forgo the torture on the treadmill? 

Even considering all of the above, I wasn't really convinced of the need or use for wearables, and even as typically a quite early adopter, I resisted the urge to have an activity tracker strapped on my arm, 24/7. Apart from anything else, I like to sleep with nothing on (I mean on my wrist, people!), and you can't do that if you want your sleep patterns monitored. If I go in, I go all in, or not at all, I felt. But this was suddenly challenged and changed by a family member who sent me a Fitbit at Christmas, and I had to consider facing my failings on my smartphone, every single day. 

I admit, it took me a few days to charge it up and strap it on, especially with some people stating that it was a prison, and a shamer of the lazy, and was only the beginning of a new form of healthcare mind (and body!) control; a modern day Big Brother that was threatening to take over our very lives, and even predict our deaths. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the naysayers were largely those that hate working out or going to the gym! 

But I went with it, and got used to having my every move, and activity, and heartbeat, and snore, monitored by the deadly device that now watched over me, 24/7. At the end of each day, my smartphone would tell me "It's time to begin winding down for bed", and I would awaken to some gentle pulses on my wrist, and a summary of the activitty of the day before on my screen. Before you even think a clear thought, you get to see how inactive you were yesterday.

Of course, it's a lot of fun on your big days, seeing you did over 12,000 steps and 30 floors of stairs, during almost 90 minutes of activity, and that your resting heart rate is the 50s. However, after a lazy weekend day, seeing the stats that show "You are a sloth, who did almost nothing in the last 24 hours" is well, not quite so much fun! Like everything else in life, I feel that the happy medium is in moderation, and getting the best out of what is supposed to be a fun addition to life, not a prison guard or roving doctor barking at you. 

It can be kind of addictive to see good stats, and then want to reach that level every day (or most days), but how much danger is there in that? If it does make one more active, then fine! The key is not taking it all too seriously, and not letting it rule one's life. "No, I can't go to the movies tonight, because I was in the office all day and had lunch there, so I am only at 1939 steps for today. I need to go walk or run this evening, or else I will have horrible stats first thing in the morning!"

Thus, use the device to encourage one to do more, but not get in the way of or ruin the quality of life. If it assists on obtaining generally improved numbers even five or six days a week, and then a bad day occurs on a Sunday, fair enough! One is still further ahead of the game than without it. In fact, for me personally, the most valuable use of my Fitbit is not truly as an activity tracker, per se, but more as a sedentary time tracker. If I go run or climb some stairs, I know what I did, but it can be much harder to take note of one's sitting time or lazy periods. 

In fact, a study in the UK in 2016 found that out of 82 technologies useful for monitoring activity, only 9 of them actually functioned as sedentary period monitors. This is where there is a gap in the market. In many ways, I don't need my butt kicked for activity inandof itself, but I probably do need it kicked to keep moving and do so more regularly. So I get my Fitbit to buzz my wrist and make sure I do a minimum number of steps per hour, every hour if possible, and that's a definite benefit to me, I feel. 

If sitting is the new smoking, then I need to do less of it! Not least as I never even tried smoking! The future of such devices is clearly in taking more responsibility for one's personal health, and even getting pre-diagnosed with characteristics of a sedentary lifestyle (before disease), as well as the integration of increasing quantities of useful data and analytics being uploadable to one's doctor and healthcare records. It's kind of a scary new world in that regard, but we aren't quite there yet. And I certainly have no intention of inputting my water intake and dietary habits to my Fitbit, that just ain't going to happen!

As invasive as biosensors and wearable technologies threaten to be, if they catch something before it kills one, how evil can they be? More significantly, if they actually provide something that might be missing - a guilty conscience or a kick in the butt or silent encouragement - and get us moving more which ultimately prevents lifestyle-related diseases from taking hold in the first place? Then they could even be a godsend, and something to enjoy rather than dread. Taking more personal responsibility for our health in this new era of personalised medicine just seems to be the appropriate thing to do. 

For this boy? My tracker deets page tells me that even though I have climbed 10 floors and done 2,000 steps, zero real activity has been detected thus far today. Guess who's going running this afternoon? :)