Smartwatches are more than just fitness tools
Walk into any gym in the United States and one thing that can easily be spotted is the number of smartwatches on everyone’s wrists.
While they can serve as a way of communication when paired with our smartphones, within the world of fitness they act as a data collector, tracking a person’s heart rate, steps, calories burned and so on. That information can do more than help someone stay in shape, it also can save a life in more ways than one.
It’s no secret that a healthy, active lifestyle can help us live longer. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adults need at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each week.
Smartwatches can tell us whether we are working out too much or too little, and give us ways to improve our workout routines.
According to Mingchia Yeh, an assistant professor in the exercise science department at Slippery Rock University, this technology had primarily been used by professionals in a laboratory setting, but now is available to all.
“Some basic features and functions you can find in most smartwatches include heart rate, step counting, velocity, distance and blood oxygen level,” Yeh said. “Along with your personal information such as age, gender, height and weight, smartwatches can further provide you with more advanced information such as calorie expenditure, VO2 max (maximal oxygen consumption), acceleration, sleep duration and quality, fatigue and readiness, and other health features such as heart rate variability and heart conditions.”
When you exercise, your body takes in oxygen through the lungs and delivers it to the muscles. VO2 max represents the highest rate at which your body can perform these processes.
How much we need to work out can depend mostly on what our goals are, as well as knowing what your max heart rate is.
“If a person’s goal is to lose weight, I would recommend a holistic and progressive approach,” Yeh said. “It means that you need to monitor not just exercise programs, but also food consumption, hydration, sleep, recovery and stress management.”
By monitoring those metrics, a smartwatch can motivate people to stay on track, and with artificial intelligence, the devices can help recommend training programs specific to the individual.
Cory Kamer, owner of Believe N-U Fitness in Saxonburg, said to burn fat and lose weight, one must know what their max heart rate is, which can, in turn, help them determine what their “target heart rate” is when they exercise.
“If you stay within your target heart rate, you are in your fat-burn zone,” Kamer said. “That is 60% to 70% of your max heart rate. Most people need to find out what their max heart rate is because of health reasons or to make sure they are not always holding their heart to its highest level, that can be harmful. You want to maybe be at your max heart rate for 20 seconds at a time.”
Kamer said max heart rate can be determined by taking the number 220 and subtracting your age. From there, you take 60% to 70% of that number to find your target heart rate.
Yeh said the approach to gain muscle is similar to the approach to lose weight.
“The difference is that instead of monitoring heart rate, distance and duration, you might want to shift your focus to tracking sets, repetitions and resistance for weight training workout sessions,” Yeh said. “You might also need to ensure you are on track and consume enough macronutrients such as protein for muscle growth through some nutrition apps.”
Yeh said MyFitnessPal is one of many apps that can help track food intake and recommend diets that will pair with your fitness goals.
A proper diet is essential to achieving any fitness goal, but another aspect Yeh thinks often is overlooked is sleep and recovery, which these devices also can help with.
“For example, they detect your sleep cycles,” Yeh said. “Or how long it takes you to fall asleep and your total time spent in bed. They can then come up with personalized recommendations for users to develop better sleep patterns and bedtime routines.”
Another way smartwatches can save a life is by tracking heart rates, even while we are resting.
Kamer said a member of her gym told her of an instance in which she was resting in bed and her watch told her she was going into arrhythmia, which is when your heart may beat too quickly, too slowly or with an irregular pattern.
“It was getting off beat and was skipping beats,” Kamer said. “Her watch told her she was in a dangerous heart rate zone, and she went to the hospital and learned she needed surgery on her heart.”
This early detection of something wrong helped the person get the professional help she needed before it was too late, saving her life.
Michelle Dlugas, a trainer at CrossFit Recreate in Butler Township, said her smartwatch also gives her peace of mind when she goes on long-distance runs alone.
“If I am running by myself, my husband can live-track where I am,” Dlugas said. “I like those safety features so he knows where I’m at if something bad happens.”
Many brands of smartwatches and fitness technology are available, from Apple to Garmin and Fitbit, among others.
Perhaps the biggest drawback of these devices is the high price tags associated with them, ranging from $50 all the way up to $500.
“If you look on Amazon, you will see other smartwatches that are cheaper and supposedly track the same things,” Bob Hamel, a member of Believe N-U Fitness, said. “But I don’t know how good or bad those ones are.”
Yeh, along with students and staff at SRU, have been researching how good or bad those less-expensive devices are. They have found that less-expensive devices compromise accuracy.
“In one of our research projects, we tried to identify an affordable device for consumers,” Yeh said. “We tested four different devices in the range of $30 to $100. One that stood out was Vivosmart from Garmin. This device is the most accurate device when measuring heart rate under resting conditions, under cycling and under running conditions compared to the other devices.”
Yeh said some devices have a higher price tag because they were tested through a third-party company, which helps validate their accuracy. But that testing comes at a cost to the company that created the device, thus a more expensive product.
Dlugas said she has experienced some inaccuracies depending on the type of activity she is doing.
“I find as far as my heart rate, they are more accurate when I’m running versus when I’m doing cross fit and weightlifting,” Dlugas said. “Through my own research, it sounds like the wrist-based heart rate monitors like watches are not super accurate when you are doing things with a lot of movement in the wrists like weightlifting.”
Yeh, Kamer, Dlugas and Hamel all think there are going to be more advances in the near future with this technology, with devices getting smaller.
One current example is Oura rings, which are rings that don’t have a screen like smartwatches and direct the information straight to a cellphone app to be viewed.
There also are ways smartwatches can be utilized within a gym, Hamel said. At a previous gym he was a member of, he would take classes with a trainer and everyone in the class would pair their smartwatches to a TV, which displayed everyone’s heart rate, among other metrics.
“An instructor can then see if they need to push the class a little bit harder or if they are pushing too hard,” Hamel said.
Yeh said he is hopeful that devices will become more accurate when it comes to tracking sleep.
“Technology still has its limitations to detect fine movement during sleep and to accurately interpret heart rate variability data,” Yeh said. “These limitations make features such as sleep quality and fatigue status less convincing at the moment, but I believe we will break through it soon.”
This article originally appeared in the April edition of Butler County Business Matters.
