I got a Fitbit 103 as a gift a few months ago. I didn’t really see the point of it, since I use Pacer on my phone to track my exercise when I feel like doing that. But today I dug out the Fitbit and, just for curiosity’s sake, took a walk with both the Fitbit and Pacer on my phone running.
As far as I can see, the Fitbit’s results are WAY off. Pacer says I walked 1.78 miles and took 3421 steps. It also shows a map of my route and as far as I can tell, the mileage seems accurate. Fitbit says I walked 0.80 miles and took 2045 steps. I know my phone has a GPS and the Fitbit doesn’t (AFAIK), which might explain but not excuse the distance inaccuracy. I thought the Fitbit might be MORE accurate than my phone in counting steps, since the Fitbit is a single purpose device, but there’s no way I took only 2045 steps in walking 1.78 miles. The Fitbit seems so inaccurate as to be useless. Am I missing something about how to use this thing?
I have used several Fitbits and like them. I remember calibrating by walking a measured mile then calculated my stride length and entered it in settings. I have checked it out a few times with mapping apps and they agree.
The one I have now tracks my heart rate quite accurately (per nurse & BP machines) and gives me decent feedback on sleep quality & cardiac health.
I have never used a phone app to track steps, I guess I should but it might be like the proverb about a man with two watches…
You need to find another Fitbit and repeat the experiment. I can see the two devices being off by a few percent, but something very odd is happening here. Perhaps you have a bad Fitbit that needs to be sent back to be fixed. I personally use an app on my iPhone that has GPS and seems to be very accurate. My 30-year-old daughter uses a Fitbit and swears by it.
I think they’re good for a guideline, but you get more accuracy from a heart-rate monitor. I have a Fitbit Charge 2 and I’m not sure it’s completely accurate. But it gives me some sense of my activities. It may be one of those things, like other electronic devices, that will eventually get better over time.
I find mine (I’m on my second model) to be pretty accurate. There are some weird things, like if you’re pushing a shopping or baby carriage or carrying handweights, where the steps don’t count even close to correctly. I put it in my pocket then. That’s if you don’t have an older clip-on one. The wrist ones don’t track well when your arm isn’t free to bounce up and down freely. And if I jog in place it sometimes counts them weird.
When I track with Map My Run, they sync up fairly well. But I don’t look for exact measurements. It’s more “Today I am tired… oh, it was 11k” or “I was lazy yesterday, only 2k.” I use it more for overall trends and patterns. I don’t think anything can be 100% accurate so I tend to be more of a bigger picture than individual days user.
^ That’s why I use a Zip, which clips on to my pants and doesn’t add to the crap hanging off my wrists. No “stair,” no heart rate, no sleep commentary. No charging (it uses a small battery). Just a little pedometer.
I am almost constantly standing at my job, walking around my classroom, crouching next to students. My understanding is that slow pacing doesn’t get counted very accurately, though–and an article I just read said that iPhones (which is what I use) tend to undercount steps by 21% or so during daily activities.
I try to use my pedometer as a motivator, not as an accurate tracker. If I check it, and push myself to get to the next nice round number, it’s doing some good, and in that sense it’s “working.”
But without a clinical heart monitor, my understanding is that you’ll not get an accurate and precise count.
I have a Fitbit Flex 2. Got it for really cheap when the model was being dumped. (Just looked at the price on Amazon. :eek: Over 3 times what I paid.) It’s a basic model. No display, no GPS, no heart rate, etc.
Did a guesstimate on stride length when setting it up. Compared it on a treadmill at the gym and turns out I guessed right.
I don’t wear it on my wrist (during the day), keep in in my pocket. And works well enough.
I know someone at the pool who wears one to measure their swimming. Guess it works for them. I just count laps.
My real use is for seeing how restless I am at night. Sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s just plain goofy. E.g., it will decide that I slept from 11 to 7. Wait, that’s 11am to 7pm? What the what??? It completely ignores the setting to measure sleep only from 11pm to 7am.
Another complaint about my Flex 2: syncing is really difficult. Sometimes it takes ~5 tries and once in a great while it just takes a slew of tries. Even fully charged.
It has that USB charging thing. Why not allow syncing using that on my PC? Easy peasy.
Oh, a PC? Sorry, FtG, you’re in another universe. It all has to done with an app on a device that has so little memory I have to install/uninstall stuff to change settings on some things and all that nonsense. (The app also forces portrait mode on a tablet I use in landscape mode exclusively. Stupidity at work.)
As a Computer Science PhD and former prof, I see a ton of “F-” stuff in Fitbit’s software and website.
Yeah, syncing is always a crapshoot. And even though it syncs over Bluetooth, the app absolutely must have an internet connection to sync. Who knows why.
And if you are going to have a single button on a fitness device, it should be a robust design to handle the shock and impact that the device will experience. Fitbit decide that a tiny, cheap, fragile, and unreplaceable speck of plastic was good enough. The damn things are poorly designed.
If you’ve got it on your arm, it’s measuring arm swings. This can be easily misled - it won’t count steps at all if you are resting your arm on something like a grocery store buggy, and it can overcount fairly easily (I know someone who’s fitbit would count steps while they were driving)
It should be more accurate if you put it in your pocket when you want to know your steps, but you lose some of the other functionality.
In my experience, they’re accurate-ish but there’s a lot of variation. In reality, they’re not great for counting your absolute steps but instead for helping track your relative activity rates. If you notice that you’re below YOUR average for a day, it will sometimes motivate me to walk the dog a few extra blocks or take an extra flight of stairs. If you’re trying to collect hard data, I wouldn’t rely on it, but it works somewhat as a personal reminder / motivator.
I found a darling metal band on Etsy through StrapsCo. It has a magnetic clip, so I can tighten it around my wrist with no problem. My band that came with the FitBit kept breaking.