TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Gets Fit

published on May two thirt enjoy. We want to talk about what these devices are, what they do, how they do it, and whether or not they're actually effective if you want to do something like lose weight or get fit. Yeah. Just I mean, you know, not that that many people

are interested in that kind of thing. Yeah, you know, yeah, there's just like maybe two right, Okay, So the last few times I've gone to C E S I have noticed it really was I think it was two years ago where that it was dramatically apparent that fitness tracking and activity tracking is a real thing. I mean, it's

it's huge, huge, booming industry. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, as as between circuitry getting smaller and uh sinking, technology improving and the software improving and just all of these things have been coming together to create these smaller, sleeker, you know, better devices that can really help people out things that are things like interoperability to where it can interact with computers or smartphones. Not not every device does that.

Let's be clear about that. There are a lot of devices out there that have kind of a limited use like that. Maybe they just sink with a computer, or maybe it's just a standalone device, but a lot of them do sync up with more than one device. You can do it with a smartphone application or or a computer or other things as well, and they'll let you.

They'll let you port port whatever data you record into different apps, so that if for example, you're into this kind of thing and you have a favorite app, you can you can use that one to crunch your numbers rather than whatever other proprietary thing they have created. Right, right, So this gives you a chance to, uh, to really keep a good look, you know, get a really good look at how much activity you are you have throughout a given amount of time, like a week or a day.

So you might say, all right, I want to set a goal for myself and this device will help me measure up against that goal and decide, you know, am I am I meeting my goal. Do I need to uh to crank up the activity. Do I need to maybe you know, do a three mile jog in the morning in order to hit what my goals are? Do I need to um to scale back? Or for for

for hardcore trainers, am I running my heart rate too hard? Yeah? Yeah, So it all depends on what device you have, whether or not you can actually do these things, because, like we said, not every device does everything. In fact, depending upon what you want, that's going to really guide your choices when it comes to picking an activity tracker. If you're interested in something like that, absolutely, and there's there's a lot of really terrific reviews out there on the internet.

We'll mention at least one good site to go to later on in the podcast. Yeah, there's I came across lots and lots of them. And it's interesting too because you can see where the different preferences come into play, because one reviewer might say, well, you know, X is the best activity tracker because it does things this way, and someone else to say, no, no no, no, why is the best activity tracker because it does things in this other way? And it's just because it appeals to that

particular person a very personal choice. Right So, so that's one thing you can get you can walk away with right now, is that we're not gonna at the end of this podcast. It's not like we're gonna say the best activity tracker is blah blah blah, because it all depends on what you want to get out of it now. Frankly, I think if you are looking at one of these things, the thing you really want to get out of it is is making sure that you are living a healthy lifestyle.

And most of the ones that are on the market right now will help you do that depending on how you use it. It's it's not a magic device that automatic turns you into a fit pro athlete right now. Now. You have to you have to have your own a

personal sense of motivation about exercising first. Probably obtaining a fitness tracker is going to be one of the steps that you're you know, carrying out in this motivation UM and and study studies have shown um that that that just mindfulness about this kind of thing can really help you out from lots lots of different corners of health and fitness. When when you are given the power to track your own data and to kind of take it into your own hands like that, maybe gamify at a

tiny bit you it really helps you out right. There's an expert. Her name's Dina Bravada. I'm sure you ran across her name several times as well, because it's all over the place in the research on activity tracking, and she has said that there there is a bit of a bias that's present with activity trackers in the sense of the people who are interested in them. She says

that here's a quote. Often those kind of programs have been criticized because they attract people who are already physically active. In general, there are two categories of people who use these trackers, those who are told to wear them by a doctor because of an underlying health problem and those who are really active and just get a kick out of knowing their data. Now, none of that is a smack against these activity trackers and whether or not they

are effective in what they do. She is simply saying that this is the person side of that equation, not the technology side of that equation. So let's assume that at least some of you guys out there listening are very much interested in this kind of stuff, and you are either interested in just knowing how they work in general, or you're actually thinking, hey, I would kind of like to look into one of these. How do they track activity?

What exactly is being tracked? And what other features might I be interested in if I want to get one of these things myself. So I thought we'd talk a little bit about some of the basic technology cheese that you find inside some of these trackers, right, because these little these little bitty watch sized or bracelet sized or clips clips. You know, you have very very small devices these days. You can pack a lot of tracking devices into them. Yeah, the sensors that are available now really

boggle the mind. And like we said, I don't think there is a device out there that has every single version of what we're about to talk about. But I have not seen one. Yeah, but many of them have several, some of them only have one or two some And it may be that the way that they're packaged is very attractive, but they but from a technological point of view,

they are comparatively simple. But I think one very basic technology we can talk about that you can find, and in fact, some people will argue that this is really all you need if you just want to track some basic activity is a predometer, right, and these have been mechanical predometers. I believe it's been around since the nineteen sixties, and they hypothetically this is this is tenuous, tenuous reportage. But but some people say that the da Vinci or

Thomas Jefferson came up with the idea many many moons ago. Yeah, that's a pretty big spread in years, if I know my history. But yeah, and I do. But yeah, a podometer today it takes a pretty basic form. Usually you have some sort of display that's going to tell you how many steps you have taken. That's what a podometer does. It's supposed to measure how many steps you take. So how does it do that. It's essentially counting the number

of times your foot makes impact with the ground. And really that means it's just measuring various shaking of your body. So if you are in a car and you're on a pathicularly bumpy road, it's going to start registering that as footsteps if it's particularly bumpy, right, or or if you hold it in your hand and sway your arm back and forth, you would totally fool the device, right, Not that I know that from prior get fit corporate

um programs that I have cheated a tiny bit on. Right, If you're not benefiting any one at that point, let's let's stop the cheating. Hey, Lauren, aren't you the team captain of our own departmental cheating. I was demonstrating to people how the device worked, and I was accused of using that as a way of boosting your numbers. All right, team captain, Now I've learned a little more about you.

So anyway, what's what's going on here is inside the pedometer you have a system that essentially forms a switch. All right, You've got you've got a weight, and when that weight moves it can make a connection that closes a switch and counts as a step. And then when it moves away that and hits it again, that counts as another step. So every time this weight disconnects and

then reconnects with a contact, a step is registered. And uh, you know, it used to be that these were pretty big mechanical things where you had a weight suspended on like a spring or a pendulum or a small ball that could roll back and forth across a tiny track. Right now, we're talking about things that are on the the micro structure level. But it's still this basic mechanical motion of making a contact breaking a contact, and that every time you do that break is what counts is

a step. Yeah, so uh, it's still still the same mechanical approach. It's just now it's much much, much, much smaller than what it used to be back in the sixties or earlier. If we are to believe that some of our our genius ancestors came up with this idea, it was probably Tesla, yeah, and it always ends up being Tesla, although his probably would also bring down an airplane. So uh. Anyway, the old predometers, if you would actually pick one up and shake it, you might hear a

clicking noise, and that's the little switch that's inside it. Again, it might be that little ball if it's using that particular kind of technology. The newer ones, again are all chet based. They don't have those little those. They don't have things large enough to make that kind of clicking noise unless you've been shaking it way too hard, in which case something is probably loose and it may not be working at all anymore. But anyway, that's your very

basic pedometer, so it's not terribly accurate. In the sense that it can't it can't distinguish between different kinds of impact and say, oh, well that was definitely a step versus that was just a bump, right. Um. But they are getting a little bit more technologically advanced in that. Originally you had to use the counter and combine that with a calculation of how long each of your steps were in order to calculate distance. These days, they can

do that for you with onboard computers. Sure. Oh so instead of saying like, oh, my stride is this many inches long, therefore this many steps and having to get a little bit of math. Right by the way, I said inches, and I would say miles because I live in America and that's what we do. But centimeters meters that kind of thing, right, it would It does the math depending on what scale you're using. The more advanced version of this sort of approach is the accelerometer. Right now,

an accelerometer is different. It's not got a little switch that's just registering a change. Yeah, it's not just like that was a shake. It's actually detecting changes in velocity. Uh. Now, velocity is speed plus direction, So if you alter that velocity, then you are talking about an accelerating force. So, for example, when you start, when you start from a standstill and you start moving into a run, that's accelerating. You're accelerating into a run. Now, once you hit top speed, you

are no longer accelerating. You may be maintaining a speed. But accelera arometers are all meant to detect these changes in velocity. And you've got two basic categories of accelerometers. There are many types of accelerometer rometers, but they fall into two basic categories. They're static accelerometers. Now, these measure a static uh form of acceleration. For instance, gravity. Gravity is static, it's not change when you are on the surface of the Earth. It's going to remain the same.

And so you might wonder why would you need a stack accelerometer. It's so that you can determine the rotation of a device in respect to the surface of the Earth. Very important for something like a smartphone. Where you are holding the smartphone, you move it from portrait to landscape, the static accelerometer is what tells it, oh, the the attitude of this phone has changed, not that you're giving

off attitude necessarily. You might be texting I usually am this is fair, but rather the position in relative to the surface of the earth. So if you were to turn it into the landscape mode, the screen would would change to reflect that. That's why a stack accelerometer is useful. For dynamic accelerometers, they measure changes in motion of the accelerometer itself, so the accelerometer is part of the larger device.

So this is to measure the changes in accel oration of that device, not in respect to the ground, but just within that device itself. So you might have both types in a fitness tracker. If the fitness tracker has some sort of screen that will rotate depending upon how you're holding your arm. Let's say it's a it's a screen that's on a wristband or something that's like a watch, and then it might have a stack accelerometer and a

dynamic one. The dynamic one would be more useful for it to detect changes in velocity and thus translate that into motion that the user is moving around and that means that the user is burning calories and is there's there's activity going on, So that's part of the data that this device will gather and analyze to translate that into This is what your body is doing right right, and we should we should add at this point that that a lot of the actual output of data that

these devices are giving you is not UM. Is not the actual data that these sensors are taking in a lot of it is UM really fancy algorithms. And and thank you to Peter on Facebook for writing in and telling me that I totally say that wrong sometimes because

I do UM. You know, it's it's it's approximating more complex technology, or it's gathering together a bunch of these little tiny numbers and figuring out something useful that I can tell you in return, exactly taking this raw data and making it meaningful to us, because otherwise we really what an accelerometer would tell you is how much voltage it was generating, which doesn't help us at all. That doesn't that's not meaningful to at least it's not meaningful

to me, and I suspect not to Lauren. Uh. Some of you electricians out there might say, no, I totally get it, but the rest of us are thinking, no, we need this translated into something that makes sense, like how many calories did I burn or how many steps did I take? Or how far did I go? So that's that's the basic uh two kinds of accelerometers. The the types underneath those are how they detect these changes

in velocity. UH. And there's a lot there's there are capacitive ones, there's piece of electric, there's piezo resistive, there's magneto resistive, there's heat transfer. There's lots of different types. There's some that use light. But the one that I think, the type that's used the most in electronics as far as I can tell, is the capacity of type. And so you might wonder how does this work. You've got

some micro structures within a chip, all right. One of them is you've got a housing which is mounted directly to whatever the devices on a substrate. So this housing will move in uh, the same way that the device itself moves. It's it's dependent upon that. Then you've got a little micro structure inside of it that can move freely,

uh in respect to the housing. So if you were to shake the device, the micro structure would lag a little bit and then pick up that motion, just as if you had a spring with the ball on the end and you started moving the top of the spring and then the ball would start to move. It's this whole momentum thing that's coming up. You've also got these other little bitty structures, these micro structures inside this this tiny little chip, and I'm talking about teeny tiny. We're

we're tug on the level of microns, right. These are all called a microelectro mechanical systems. Yeah, they're they're so small that you have to have an automated system to etch them onto chips because there's no human with the precision necessary to make these things so super tiny. But as the microstructure moves, it starts to move between these plates that have capacitance. That changes the capacities. It causes current to flow, and measuring the current tells you how

much this device is moving. And by putting these chips in different arrangements within a device, you can track different types of movement because you can only detect movement along one axis with it with a very simple accelerometer. That means that you can detect movement along one line of one one vector. Really you can't anything beyond that. It wouldn't detect. So let's say left right versus up down.

If you had three of these accelerometers or to two axis accelerometers that were at right angles to one another. You could then detect things like along the x axis, the y axis, and the z axis. So three axis accelerometers what we call those, and those are that those are the popular ones and in all of the new devices coming out these days. Yeah, and it's also the kind of stuff you find in things like video game controllers.

Uh and it's you know, some of them. You hear about six axis, which is really just getting more specimilar, more precise. Um. Yeah, And so this will detect those changes in motion and be able to translate that into again meaningful data once you run those raw numbers through whatever software you've got. Uh. So those are your two basic ways of detecting motion from a purely like this

device is moving kind of perspective. There are other things that will also detect motion, which we'll talk about as well in a little bit. Before I get to that, though, I do need to say there's a couple other things that are important about accelerometer. One is that sensitivity of an accelerometer is extremely important. The more sensitive and accelerometer is, then the more it will generate a larger charge in our larger change in signal rather for a given change

and acceleration compared to a less sensitive chip. So these bigger changes are easier to measure, and that gives the

device a better idea of the actual changes in acceleration. So, in other words, if you if you make it so that these changes are are huge, uh, it can really narrow down the parameters of what that change means, and it can be more precise in thinking this is more likely an actual step versus something just bump their knee on their desk and went out, Yeah, yeah, the technology is getting a lot better at um weeding out those

false positives exactly. And then there are other things you've got to keep in mind, like what's the maximum swing of your accelerometer that's telling you how much force it can measure or how much of a change in acceleration it can measure. Uh. This is really more important if you are designing something that moves really really fast and comes to really fast stops, like a jet, not so much with a person, because while you feel you might be fast compared to other stuff, you're really slow less

less fast in the jet. And then you have bandwidth, which is how many times a second you can take a reliable acceleration reading. Uh, and we don't need anything too precise for human activity because again, we're not moving that quickly. But these are things that are important in accelerometers in general. Guys, we gotta take a quick break from this classic episode so I can get some more

steps in, but we'll be right back. All right, we're back. So, so we've talked about accelerometers and presometers, there is one other way the device can track whether or not you've moved around, right, Because accelerometers are really great. Fear for example, on a treadmill, Yeah, fantastic because it doesn't have to track your location. It just has to track what you

are doing. But if you have a GPS receiver in your activity tracker, and some of them do with them, you can actually track where you are in relation to I don't know anything else on the planet. But these are not so useful if you're just running on a treadmill. No, but but they are very much more accurate for calculating

the distance that you have gone. Right. Yeah, So GPS in general, this Global Positioning system, Uh, what what's going on is You've got the satellites that are beaming down information here to the planet and network of twenty four of them. Yeah, so your GPS receiver receives this these

signals from the various satellites. Now, each satellite is sending its own unique signal down that has essentially a time stamp on it, right, and they're all synchronized, right, So you're getting these different signals all at the same time from at least usually at least three satellites. Four works best, four works best, and and so your device gets these

different signals from these different satellites. And by measuring how long it took the signal from each satellite to get to that uh, that device it just compares that against its own its own little internal clock. It can tell you where you are in the surface of the Earth. Technically you could be in one of two places, but that second places inside the Earth. So we pretty much

just say that's not yea, it cuts that right out. Yeah, And this was originally military technology, I believe in the seventies, in the eighties and nineties. In fact, when when we first started getting consumer access to the Global Positioning System, Uh, the accuracy of that system for consumers was limited on purpose, right, Yeah, They they put limitters into the devices to say like, yeah, we don't really want you to know this thing. We can say you are somewhere within feet here is here ish.

But now they're very very accurate. It's eventually gotten to the point where, uh, you know, it's it's just the way technology works. It's kind of creepy accurate. Yeah. Yeah. So the GPS, for seever, will track where you are by by taking all this information from the satellites and running that through its own algorithm and then determining what your location is on the Earth. And that way you can do something like, uh, if you jog a specific path and you really liked it, you can plot it

against a map and share it with other people. Or you can just, you know, see how far you went based upon some mapping program. It may be that you could compare how far you went based from the map compared to whatever the activity tracker says. Because some of these have multiple sensors in them, right, some of them might have a pedometer or some other um means of saying this is how many steps you took, and use these in conjunction too. Yeah, And it's funny because I've

seen somewhere they do both. They have the GPS tracker and they have the podometer part where it tells you how far you went based upon how many steps you took, and you can compare the two to see how accurate the pedometer is, and in some cases it's not so accurate. That's why reading reviews is really important because you might you might I'd say, well, if I go by the predometer, it says I ran four point five miles, but when I look at the map it says two miles. So yeah,

that is that has a large difference. Yeah, there there was actually a review I saw that specifically said that. Okay, so those are all the various kinds of sensors and technologies that might be an activity tracker to relate to motion you moving around, but there are other sensors to right, Yeah, there's a whole bunch of them. And these these are all the physiological sensors that are going to track things

like your sweat and your heart rate. And there's been a bunch of different things over the years that have that have contributed to this. The original heart rate monitor, of course, was the electro cardiogram a k A the e c G or e kg um, and that was using electrical pickups in an amplifier circuit that would detect the hearts electrical impulses through your skin. Um. And you know when when your heart beats, it the way that

it does it is it generates these pulses. It sends a signal out over the nerve pathways on the surface of the heart that caused the muscle to contract during each heartbeat. And by picking up those electrical signals, you can you can track your heartbeat, which is really groovy for UM, for knowing how hard your body is working, right, because I mean, there's there are a lot of things

that are important when you're exercising, right. It's not just how much activity you're doing, how many calories you're burning. If you want to have really good cardio workouts, if you want to have a good aerobic workout, then you need to get to have your heart beating and within a certain range for a certain amount of time. Right. Uh. And and that's I'll get into that a little bit more and in the moment. But e c G s

are a little bit more clunky. UM. Usually they work with a chest strap that many runners, especially because they're they're they're bouncing around moving a lot, found very uncomfortable

to wear. UM. And so a new technology that has come out and has become the standard in non invasive heart rate sensor sensory has been the photo platesmo graph a k a. The PPG WOW, which may or may not be called an optical heart sensor for people who don't even want to mess with that entire word, Well, yeah, photo would tell me that there's light that's playing a

role in this somehow. Yes, PPGs bounce light and most cases from an l E ed in terms of fitness trackers, because LEDs are cool bulbs that will not you know, burn your skin, burn your skin, which is cool. Um uh. They bounce light through your skin and back to a sensor and measure the volume of blood moving through your capillaries. And the way this works is that blood absorbs more light than it's surrounding tissue. So the less light that comes back to the sensor, the greater the volume of

blood is moving through those capillaries at the time. Um And and this this volume pulses with each heart beat, and so by tracking those pulses, a PPG tracks your heart rate at rest and during exercise. That's really cool. So this is the same sort of thing you get when you go into a doctor's office and they have like the little finger clamp thing that ends and it uses it shines a light onto your fingertip. That is

exactly what that is. UM. And these these days they have become they're they're they're getting a little bit more sensitive and UH. And most of them will come in watch format and it will be right against the inside of your wrist. But you know there they can they can be thrown off by the movement of your skin and muscles UM, which happens during workouts pretty frequently. Be

in light, I would imagine, can also cause problems. So some models are pairing a PPG with an accelerometer, sometimes a devoted accelerometer, in order to compensate for your body's movement. Cool and UH as also an interesting point, not entirely relevant fitness trackers, but I thought that this was so cool.

PPG works differently with different wavelengths of light, and so in laboratory and hospital situations, infrared radiation can sometimes be used to assess blood volume in deep tissue, whereas light in the visible range is used in smaller, more commercial devices like these fitness trackers. Oh excellent, awesome, So what else Okay, so we've got we've got very ways of tracking the how hard or how quickly your heart is beating. We've got the idea of position. Are there other ones

as well? Another great thing to figure out how much you're exerting yourself is the galvanic skin response sensor, which is a really fancy way of saying how much are you sweating right now? Um? It attracts your perspiration by measuring the conductivity of your skin. Um, because your skin is a pretty good conductor of of of electricity to begin with, but when it's wet a k A. When you're sweating, it's an even better conductor. So um. So yeah.

The the the amount that you're perspiring relates to how much you're exerting yourself, and so by tracking this this conductivity, you can track your exertion. Another great way is through thermometers, good old thermometers um, sometimes infra red, sometimes heat flux, which just detecting the increase in temperature on you on the surface of your skin, right yeah, as well as I assume there has to be one to the text ambient temperature as well. It's usually two pairent thermometers, one

tracking your body temperature exactly one. Tracking the ambient temperature because you're higher body temperature means that you're working harder, and you'd also be working harder in a colder ambient temperature. Gotcha, gotcha, as opposed to it's just plain hot, right exactly right, all right. So these are various trackers and sensors that you can find in a lot of the activity trackers that are out there. There are other ones as well.

Some of them are much more specific, and when you get down to things like, well, how does it track your sleep? Well, that's usually things you know, tracking the changes in motion. Again, it's usually the accelerometer. If it has something that tracks your heart rate, it will be tracking your heart rate. Yeah, but it's basically it's usually

how much you're wiggling around? Yeah. Yeah, So so if you you know, it'll that's all when you plug in this device, when you sink sink it with whatever, whether it's an app or it's your computer. Uh, and you get the data back saying you had a really good night's sleep and maybe because you took it off and set it down next to you instead of war it. Um. So yeah, I mean these are these are the basic ways it gathers information. Now, the way it processes information

is different from one company to the next. It's all various proprietary softwares and algorithms that take this, crunch the data and turn it into stuff that makes sense to us. Yeah, some of them have really great onboard computers for doing that. Um, they're very tiny onboard computers for doing that too, to give you a little bit of a live output, and some of them give you zero live output other than

maybe a little blinking led or something like that. Right, I had a body media fit, for example, and that did not have its own screen. Rather, it would you would have to sink that either to an app via Bluetooth or you would sink it to your computer via a USB cable, and then you could make sense of what information had been collecting. But you couldn't even tell

what it had been collecting until you did that. Right, There was no uh, screen indicators, so you couldn't read it at a moment's notice, unless you have to have your phone they're paired with it, in which case you could pull up the app and take a look that way. Um. But yeah, there are other devices that have a dedicate screen, so it's going to give you at least some information,

if not everything. And you know, it's again that depends very highly on your personal preference and how much information you need at the moment and how much you just kind of want to check up on it later. Yeah, And and some of these will give you information that's in uh, very kind of concrete terms, in the sense of this is how far you walked, or this is

how how much activity your heart has had today. You know, how how how often were you in that perfect zone when you were working out versus you weren't quite pushing yourself as hard as you needed to, or maybe you were pushing yourself too hard you need to pull back off. Some of them are a little more vague, like so Nike's fuel Band, for example, everything's in fuel points. And I know that the fuel band is very popular. It's a gorgeous device, looks very year full disclosure. My wife

has one. She loves it. She and she has the app that it's paired up with on her iPhone so

she can see what's going on. But it's doing everything in fuel points, and some people have said, some critics have said that that makes it less useful because you don't know what they mean necessarily, I I think, well, you know, and it always reminds me of Microsoft Points and how you're kind of sort of tricking the system in order to make it a little bit more of a game and less of a reality, which helps lots of people actually, because because a lot of people don't

want to know how many steps they've taken, They're like, oh, that was a lot of I wasted so much time getting fit yesterday. Why did I do that? But if you get fuel points, then you get especially especially if it has a gamification element to it, where you are measuring your own activity versus the activity of other people. If you set your if you have a way of setting a specific goal using one of these trackers, and the tracker can keep track of that so that it

will tell you, hey, you met your goal today. That's a reward system, right you you merely get that reward, that sense of satisfaction that you have met your goal for that day. Then you have the added satisfaction if there's a gamification level, they're beyond just just just getting the badge for yourself. If you can share that badge with your friends and say, hey, guys, check what I did Did you do it? You didn't do it? Suck

up right? Yeah. So if you're all using like fitbits, for example, I know people who are using fitbits as a way of challenging each other to see how many steps they could take. Uh, and they would. You know, there'd be groups of friends who were trying to walk out walk each other, which is great. I mean, you know, yeah, if that gives you the motivation to get exercise, that's great.

You know, there's there's nothing wrong with using the desire to rub your friends faces and your achievements in order for you to get fit, as long as you, you know, practice some restraint a little bit hypetically, I can tell you that a punch to the face is not good for your physical fitness. You know, there's been a lot of activity on this podcast. I think it's time for us to take a quick break to thank our sponsors.

There's some devices out there that have games built into the software of the device or on the computer that you play so that as you use the device, as you move around, you generate like online currency to play in a little online game. To Strive has that there's a little online game where you can as you walk around, you generate coins, and using those coins you can buy stuff in the game world of little bit like sonics,

rings or something like that. Yeah, but it's using this you generate the currency just by moving around, so that's the incentive. Yeah. Or an office favorite for a while was a Zombie Run I think is the name of the app? Which which which? I think it's run Zombie Run something like that, something like that. Yes, that that gave you. It was hooked up to a GPS related system on your cell phone, and I would would give you these little like are you out running the zombies

or are you totally dying? Right? Yeah? I used to have In fact, I had the beta version of that app back when it came out in the beta form for Android. And the way I don't know if it still works this way. I haven't used the app in a long time, but the way it originally worked was that you would be somewhere and you would tell it

where you wanted to go. You would open up a map program and this zombie app and say, all right, here's you know, based on my GPS location, this is where I am, this is where I want to go. It would then generate these virtual zombies on the map that could actually move, so the little blips would start moving toward you, and your goal was to get to your destination without being intercepted by one of those little

zombie blips. So you might have to find a different route than the one you had intended, and you may have to book it, and yea, yeah, you might have to. You might have to speed up and slow down, which in running terms is is actually really great for training. So and there were also, as I recall, there were story elements to that game as well that that were

added in later. I had it where it was just the game mechanic, but I know and it may not even be that app and maybe a similar one, because there were a few that came out had the same sort of theme. But there was one where there was an overall progressive storyline and as you participated, you would unlock more of the story. I got eaten. I couldn't get from I couldn't get from the train station to my house because there was really there was only one way you could go by foot, and it kept wanting

me to cut through the woods. I kept wanting to not run into barbed wire fences that are hard to see. Look, if you don't bring your bolt cutters to the zombie apocalypse, then I don't think you're gonna get very far. And I'm no longer allowed to bring my bolt cutters to work. That was the problem, right, because this was my commute back home, and so I already had that limitation set on me. I tell you, you you make one silly mistake with a with an internet line, and they just never

let you forget it. It's crazy. We're very unforgiving here and how stuff works. But the game of vacation obviously plays a big part. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's the recommended target number of steps per day for for healthy human people. It's about ten thousand and um and that's that equals out to maybe about five miles and uh and and yeah, so so anything that helps people get to that. And and in fact, Dina Bravada, the person I mentioned that at the top of the podcast,

who you know. She's she's a specialist in health matters and has expressed some skeptic skepticism as to whether or not these activity trackers are really you know, a huge benefit. I mean, they helped the people who are already interested.

But she did notice. She did a study or she was part of the study where uh, they gave pedometers to a group of participants in a randomized trial where some some participants didn't get a pardometer, some did, and they were all asked to kind of track their activities. And it turned out that the people who had the pedometers increased their physical activity by about two thousand three steps per day over the baseline. And uh and so that ended up being a twenty seven percent increase in

physical activity. And that's Bravaded said, well, that's significant. So if you have if you're actually using one of these things and you're paying attention to it, then you are more likely to actually engage in more physical activity and thus exercise more and be have a healthier lifestyle. Um. And that's that's the chief argument for these activity trackers is the idea that with this information you can really be more mindful of what you are doing and how

it's affecting you. A lot of these activity trackers come with software that also have as part of it a way of keeping a a food journal, which is also very important because you could be exercising, but if you're not eating well, then that's not gonna help you can be sabotaging yourself certainly. So for example, the body media fit device, I had uh part of the software that you would have once you had to subscribe to it. So you you'd have to buy the device and you

had to subscribe to the service. But once you subscribe to the service, you could track your meals. And every meal you would track, it would tell you how many calories you've consumed. It would break it down, I what type of calories they were, etcetera. And then the the information from the device would tell you how many calories you had burned. And so that would give you an idea like did I burn more calories than I consumed? If I did, then I'm on the road to losing weight.

I mean that's a that's a very basic way of figuring it out, calories out. But it also meant that you were much more mindful when you started doing things like you sat down for a meal. You'd think, oh, wait a minute, you know, if I want to if I want to be on track and I don't want to have to go home and run five miles, I probably shouldn't pig out on that deep fried onion. Even

though it's super tasty. Now, there is a flip side to this coin of course, we're talking all about keeping all this data and and really looking at and making something meaningful. Uh, there can come a point where too much data is actually harmful, where you're just you're just overwhelmed by all the information and you can't really see a way of using it in a in a way that makes sense. That can happen. I don't know that.

I think most activity trackers are pretty good where you're not going to get that much unless you're really digging down and you want to see Oh, no, I want to I want this in pie chart form. No, I wanted in line graph form. But that is one of those things that we're going to be looking into later in a in a later episode of Tech Stuff. We've

already planned on recording this. We haven't recorded it yet, but we want to do an episode where we're talking about kind of that anxiety you get when you have so much information that you know, you start to think, is my life being boiled down to data points and charts? Yeah, and how much of that is healthy? And you know it's it's yeah, whether whether or not it's okay that we know so much about ourselves at any given second. Yeah, I've I know more about me than I'm comfortable with.

But uh, and that's for a later episode. And I really do think that most of these physical activity trackers aren't quite at that level. It is a little interesting to you know, sit there and say, oh, look at my sleep patterns. What can I do to make these better? Uh,

There's really only so much you can do. And you know, you can try and make sure that the environment you're in is conducive to sleep and rest, but there are a lot of little things that you can that you can work on that a lot of people might not be completely aware of. Um. And and again a lot

of this is just about awareness. And along those lines, um, you know, these these fitness trackers that we were talking about can run from fifty fifty dollars on the low end, I guess, you know, ten dollars for the pimometer, up to two for some of the super fancy ones, or or even more for the really high level performance triathlon

kind of things. So there's a huge I mean or down to free apps that you can download for your smartphone right which is mostly using GPS tracking to figure out how far you've gone exactly, keeping in mind that that's not necessarily going to translate into a very accurate measure of how much how many calories you burned, but you at least give you an idea of how far you went. Uh, you know, it's It's definitely something that

I've been interested in the past. And you know, we're about to do this exercise thing here at work where we all have predometers, so I'm sure we're going to I'm in a group with Holly Fry who is a marathon runner, so I know my group is going to do really well. Yeah, so I don't plan on moving

for most July. That's the spirit. But but you know, it really depends on what you want the device for, how you're going to use it, and also, like we said, read reviews, because some of the ones that are really expensive may not have all the features you want and may not perform better than than less it's right, and they might just be, you know, for a different subset of human person than than you happen to be. And not yet, not all of these are for everybody. If

I may make a personal recommendation. D C. Rainmaker has a blog that is brilliant. He's a triathlon runner, but um or triathlon athlete who who's just triathlete, Yes, that would be that would be the technical term for that who has just reviewed all of the devices, all of them, get all of them, and he does and he gets very highly technical, which I'll love, um and but but also tends to put his his kind of final thoughts

in an extremely succinct package. Excellent, excellent, good recommendation. Yeah uh, and you know again, take a look. Find out what's going to work, right, you know, work well for you. You know, if if you have one that's going to sync up with a smartphone, make sure that it's compatible with which you're with your smartphone. Make sure that your smartphone has the type of Bluetooth that the device wants to sync up with, because that can be very very messy.

Right you can say, well, it was supposed to work with an iOS device, and technically this iPhone three G is an iOS device, right you know, Yeah, that's obviously something you want to make sure is all all working before you you die in guys, That wraps up this classic episode of tech stuff. Hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any suggestions, for future tech stuff topics. Get in touch with me, let me know what you

are thinking. Otherwise it's just gonna leave it up to a random chance, and that's those are not good odds. You can reach out on Twitter or on Facebook, and I use the same handle for both. It's text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.