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.
Connecting health apps to health care can enable better care for patients with chronic diseases, and it has the potential to lower skyrocketing US health spending.
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.
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.
Research shows that people’s social networks, employment conditions and life stages all impact their use of wearable devices. Understanding these factors can help you achieve your fitness goals.
If you sit all day at work, then cancer, diabetes, heart disease and death are the likely outcomes. A cardiologist explains how the simple act of counting can reverse this evolutionary trend.
Forget high-end design and cutting-edge communication. The new Watch is a fitness device and heralds a shift for the company – from enabling self-expression to nudging users toward self-mastery.
If we can solve the privacy issues, placing trackers on people and the things we make can teach us a great deal about ourselves and the world around us.
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