Your Health: Pros and Cons of wearable fitness technology

Posted by Admin September 25, 2024 Fitness

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) – The Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, and Oura ring are all wearable gadgets or smart watches that have revolutionized how we track our health and wellness. But how accurate are they?

New research shows the pros and cons of smart devices.

From steps and calories to heartbeats and zzz’s, your smart watch tracks it all. The upside of these devices is that studies show people who track their health with a smart device increase their physical activity by an extra 50 minutes per week, and an extra 1,200 steps are taken daily.

“They’re good starting points, but they don’t work the same way for everyone,” says Vanessa Volpe, a health psychologist at North Carolina State University who led a team that put smart devices to the test. “If you ever turn over that device, you can sometimes see beams of light, often green light, coming out of the back of that device.”

A green light is sent through the skin and reflected back to sensors in the watch, but Volpe says green light reflects differently on different skin tones.

“If you have more melanin in your skin, if you have darker skin, then light will not penetrate and be reflected back to the same degree.”

Volpe says it could be as low as half the signal being reflected back for people of color and could impact readings for heart rate, blood pressure, and irregular heart rhythms.

“The technology itself, the way it was designed, was not taking into account folks with different skin tones, especially folks with darker skin tones,” Volpe says.

Volpe sees this discrepancy as a sign of the medical field’s failure to grasp the impact of race on health and hopes her findings will help address racial disparities in healthcare.

Another downside to wearing your health info on your sleeve is that an unknown third party may track your information. To protect yourself, be sure to change your fitness default settings so your information cannot be shared.

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