Remember when FITBITs came on the scene? They were written off as a fitness fad with the criticism similar to the spending too much time on your iPhone looking at social media.
Smartwatch Studies have been completed. A lot of studies. There are results of 121 scientific trials with devices which involved 16,000 people.
Overall people who wear monitors take an extra 1,200 steps each day and complete nearly 50 minutes more of exercise per week. The daily activity increases were described as small to moderate.
That magic number of 10,000 is so easy to understand. It brings exercise right into focus. And lack of exercise, combined with diet, is considered to be one of the leading causes of obesity in the UK.
The article on the FITBIT in the Daily Mail said that six out of 10 adults in the UK are obese and rates in children even higher. One in seven children in England are obese by the time they start primary school.
I decided that was an unusually high number, so I looked up the adult obesity rates in the world, and in 2016:
U.S. obesity rate was 36.2% United Kingdom 27.8% Canada 29.4%
That's still a lot of people with a lot of health conditions brought on by obesity.
Since that first introduction in 2009, there are now all kinds of smartwatches on the market. FITBIT doesn't seem to be in the list of the top 7. And what's the latest feature? Crash detection when someone has been involved in a car crash and alert emergency services if the wearer is unresponsive.
