There are several things you can do to ensure you get the most accurate readings possible, RTFM. The most important first step (so to speak) to make sure your device is as accurate as possible is to read the manual. In general, the ability of trackers to count steps accurately depends on the type of movements you make throughout the day. However, the most important movements you make may be simply to stand up and start walking.
What crazy activities have you done to make your tracker falsely count as steps? It seems that nowadays everyone is trying to take their 10,000 steps, close their rings or complete any other task that their wrist-based fitness tool urges them to do. Count your steps as you walk or run an exact distance, for example, 100 meters. Fitbit recommends that you perform at least 20 steps for this process. Fitness trackers come with very general information pre-programmed.
It is important to take the time necessary to establish the specific characteristics of your body. Skipping this step may cause the readings you get to be inaccurate. Your height, for example, influences your stride. If you are significantly taller than the programmed height, the tracker might read that you are not taking the correct number of steps.
Inaccurate information can cause frustration as you start to keep track of your goals. Not long after the first tracker hit the shelves, it seemed that almost every company was striving to get the newest, best and most elegant on the market. While a fitness band, app, or smartwatch may not give you exact step count details, they do give you a good idea of your activity level and a way to compare your daily performance and gradual improvement (compete against yourself). Fitness trackers use algorithms that account for physical movement associated with specific types of physical activity, such as running, biking, swimming, and lifting weights.
Companies like Fitbit and Google are focusing their activity tracking around these metrics within the Fitbit app and Google Fit. Researchers were able to take the patterns of deceptive behaviors from all participants and use them to “train the tracker to recognize them as false, thus greatly improving the recognition of the activity. At a minimum, enter your actual age, gender, height and weight so that your fitness tracker has the most accurate starting point for estimating stride length and number of calories burned. I wouldn't recommend using that as some kind of gospel for your fitness journey.
The steps are quite arbitrary as a fitness goal in and of itself, but I like to use it to get a reading of how much I have moved on a given day. Different fitness companies get heart rate sensors from different companies, and some of those sensors aren't all at the same level. Since most people use their dominant hand to perform the vast majority of tasks that are done in a day, it is much more accurate to place the fitness tracker on the non-dominant arm. In a smart study, researchers provided participants with smartphone-based activity trackers that used an accelerometer and a gyroscope (for the speed of rotation around each axis).
While the sensors in your fitness tracker remain unchanged over time, the algorithms that make sense of the data are getting smarter and smarter. Keep in mind that every task you perform, such as cleaning the table, loading clothes, writing notes, or sweeping, can dramatically increase the number of steps recorded if you choose to use the tracker on your dominant arm. The color of your skin, the amount of hair you have on your wrist and the strength with which you wear the monitor can affect your active and resting heart rate numbers. .
