The popularity of smartwatches is really high. On the street, we can easily meet many people whose wrists are decorated with a piece of really great technology. Its application is really wide. Although these devices allow us to do a lot (NFC payments, receiving calls and many others), there are many functions offered by watches. They count our steps, track physical activity and analyze training performed, ultimately summarizing it all, providing, among other things, the number of calories burned. The ability to summarize our effort with charts, numbers and statistics is something that was not long ago reserved for professional athletes. Today, for a small amount of money, we too can track our progress.
It turns out that it doesn’t. On the web, we can easily find information about individual statistics, in which – either they don’t tell us the whole truth, or they stretch individual results. In which aspects are smart watches not so smart?
The fight to lose unnecessary kilograms is difficult, but its rules are trivial. It’s about a calorie deficit, or burning more calories than we take in during the day. To make the equation on our side, we need to control the meals we eat and know how much we manage to burn during training. A sports band or smartwatch is useful for this. Unfortunately, the data displayed by these devices differs from reality.
What’s worse, to “our advantage”. It is estimated that – from 15 to 21 percent. If in reality we managed to burn 1000 calories, the watch can inform us about even 1200 calories – a big difference. It is worth remembering this when planning meals or snacks. A morning run will not always justify an evening snack or an additional bag of chips.
Another interesting piece of information that comes from the analysis of smartwatches is how they cope with . The watch collects information about sleep phases, our heart rate, and summarizes it at night, informing us about the quality of our rest. Can we trust this data? Not necessarily. Their errors often exceed 10 percent, and even worse when we compare them to devices used in polysomnography – an actual sleep study. Then the results of the watches are almost the opposite compared to actual medical tools.
. A watch can inform us more or less about the number of hours we have slept or point out that we went to bed too late. While data from watches should not be interpreted as a final interpretation, we can use them as a guide.
The good news is that the heart rate and the efficiency of the circulatory and respiratory systems are measured well – errors are around 3%, and more are fully acceptable. This means that smartwatches are very useful and worth using. However, remember to approach the statistics and data from the watch with a certain distance.