Research is revealing that fitness trackers alone can be helpful facilitators toward changing a sedentary lifestyle but don’t motivate people to increase their physical activity.
Ben Singh, University of South Australia and Carol Maher, University of South Australia
About one in five Aussies currently own a wearable fitness tracker of some kind. Yet many people doubt their effectiveness. Let’s see what the research suggests.
From step counters and active video games to apps for exercisers and tech-enabled gear, there are a lot of ways to combine your workouts with your digital life.
Fitness information like resting heart rate collected by wearable devices can’t diagnose diseases, but it can signal when something is wrong. That can be enough to prompt a COVID-19 test.
As health care grows more digital, an array of health apps promise to track steps, count heartbeats and look at moles. But without more FDA oversight, could we be shooting ourselves in the foot?
Insurer John Hancock now requires customers to use activity trackers for life insurance policies. Here’s how that will put life insurance and even mortgages out of reach for many people.
SHARP Professor, Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Centre, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, UNSW Sydney