I was one of the early adopters of fitness trackers. But very soon thereafter I gave them up. 4 reasons:
- Inaccurate
- Not helpful
- Cardiac neurosis
- Big data
Inaccurate:
There was a class action lawsuit against FitBit based on inaccuracy of its data. Apple Watch has been very well received by cardiologists and patients alike. While it is more accurate than heart rate trackers, it still has a high rate of false positives.
Not helpful
Fitness trackers DO NOT help with weight loss and may actually be harmful. The intrinsic motivation of a person is what helps the best. Here is the original paper:
Cardiac neurosis
I have seen too many patients in my practice who become too focused on their heart to the detriment of their well being. I believe fitness trackers may be contributing to this.
Does early diagnosis equal to better outcomes. Do screening programs reduce mortality? We found that in some cases like prostate cancer, screening may or may not be helpful.
Early screening may allow for early diagnosis. But in today’s fee for service US medical business it may lead to unnecessary testing (with its financial costs and complications associated with “incidentalomas“) . There is an interesting term coined around this: VOMIT – victims of modern imaging technologies!
Big data:
You are sharing a lot of data with big companies when you browse the internet. Check out Blue Kai and what it knows about you.
Fitbit got into a little bit of a bind in 2011 when users’ sexual habits were exposed.
Apple is better than Google about data privacy, right? Wrong!
Yuval Noah Harari’s book 21 lessons for the 21st century states:
At present people are happy to give away their most valuable asset – their personal data – in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets.
We are living in the area of hacking humans. The algorithms are watching you right now. They’re watching where you go, what you buy, whom you meet. Soon they will monitor your steps, your breaths, your heartbeats. They’re relying on big data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself they can control and manipulate you and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in The Matrix or in The Truman show. In the end it’s a simple empirical matter : if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it yourself, authority will shift to them.
Of course you might be perfectly happy ceding all the authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. You don’t need to do anything about it. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control over your personal existence and the future of your life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.
Remember Minority Report?
If you are not comfortable giving advertisers data about your web browsing, how can you be comfortable giving them data about:
- Your heart rate
- Your location
- Specific changes in your heart rate when you are at different locations? Downright creepy, right?