We are big fan of wearables, but if you haven’t tried a Fitbit, Apple watch, Android wear watch or dedicated tracker it can be hard to imagine or justify the cost of these accessories, let alone get a true idea of what they can actually do.

Here I’m going to share my own experience with two of the best selling wearables (the Fitbit HR and then later the Fitbit Blaze) and what the future looks like for tomorrows wearables in the context of health, and improving your health metrics.

A typical day with the Fitbit Blaze

To provide some context as to what a wearable can do for you lets review a typical day wearing a Fitbit Blaze:

  • It’s 5am, my Fitbit vibrates gently so that I can wake up and leave the bedroom un-noticed whilst my wife and 1 year old sleep in the room.
  • I then initiate the workout mode, and my Fitbit starts tracking my morning rowing session, keeping track of my heart rate throughout.
  • Throughout the day I get a silent vibration hourly if I haven’t completed at least 250 steps in the last 50 minutes.
  • Later If I start a yoga or weights workout I re-activate workout mode to track the time and intensity of my workout.
  • Then throughout the day my Fitbit will silently keep count of my heart rate, the amount of steps walked, how many flights of steps I took as well as calculate a rough amount of calories burned and distance traveled.
  • Lastly an hour before my bedtime I’ve set a daily reminder to remind me to get my pre-sleep routines going.

The next morning I can review how much sleep I got, If I got woken up, and check my activity for the previous day / week / month on my smartphone app.

You can also use the friends feature to compare your steps tally against your friends and encourage / taunt or congratulate them using private messages.

What can wearables do for you?

For me the biggest benefit of a tracker is convenience. The ability to have silent alarms throughout the day is super convenient, and being able to schedule daily triggers is a great way to initiate and solidify new habits.

Being able to track your activity with minimal input helps you focus on your life, whilst being able to journal your progress and bake in accountability.

Certain activities can be recognised automagically, for example start a run and your Fitbit Blaze can automatically record your workout and use the GPS of your smartphone to track your route.

Fun challenges, gamified goal setting, and social competition help turn dull chores and repetitive workouts into a game. When was the last time you looked forward to parking a block away from your destination, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator at the office?

Data is meaningless unless you can put it in context, and wearable companies are working hard on creating a connection between what you do and how you look and feel. By helping you visualise your progress, and see correlations between your resting heart rate, weight, BMI and activity, sleep, and diet wearables can help your see the benefits of incremental improvement. At least this is the idea…

The current state of wearables

That said, it’s still early days. Most fitness trackers including the Fitbit Blaze, Garmin Vivosmart HR+, Apple and Android based smart watches are essentially smart pedometers with a heart rate monitor.

There are a few exceptions, such as the now discontinued basis smartwatch, the Jawbone Up3, or Microsoft band 2 which included perspiration, galvanic skin response and temperature sensors but sadly none of these will see continued development.

Essentially the magic right now comes from creating smart enough software to try and guess as much as possible from the heart rate and gyroscopic data collected by the watches. The result is impressive, but not yet conclusive and here are some areas which are still short:

Sleep data

Current sleep data collected is very basic, and none of the current generation of wearables can accurately detect all four distinct stages of sleep: Wake, REM, Light and Deep or provide detailed insight as the the quality of our sleep.  Being able to accurately track these could even go as far as helping diagnose and address sleep apnea.

Activity Recognition

The newer wearables are able to recognise some basic exercises such as walking, running, outdoor biking, elliptical walking and in some cases swimming. But many other activities such as rowing, yoga, boxing, gym exercises, and sports have to be inputed manually.

Deep activity metrics

To date wearables provide a high level view of your workout: Steps made, distance run, GPS data, heart rate, and timings. These are fine for activities such as running, or cycling but for static or complex activities such as rowing or gym workouts we are missing all the juicy information.

Which exercises did you perform, how many reps, how heavy were the weights, what was the level of intensity, how did your muscles react etc.

Physiological data

Whilst heart rate data can provide a lot of data, the applications for more physiological data such as skin temperature, galvanic skin response, blood pressure and sweat analysis could be a real game changer both for tracking your progress, and for diagnosing conditions even before they happen.

What does the future look like?

From a software standpoint Fitbit, Google, Apple, Garmin, Samsung, Huawei, LG and Motorola are all highly invested in the smartwatch category.

Apple and Google have helped make smartwatches ubiquitous and with a stable Watch OS 3, and Google Wear 2 operating system we should start seeing more innovation coming out.

Fitbit recently acquired Pebble and Vector which will help bolster the engineering talent pool and help develop a thriving app ecosystem for the next range of fitbit devices.

As for hardware, Fitbit CEO James Park has talked about his company’s ambition to include more advanced sensors to improve sleep, blood pressure and stress tracking.

With competition heating up for a place on our wrists it will be interesting to see how fitness oriented devices such as the Fitbit or Withings trackers will differentiate themselves from the more all purpose smartwatches carrying WatchOS or Google Wear.