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A number of doctors aren't so sure about the benefits of wearables eithers. A recent MIT Technology Review story found doctors from a number of specialities unsure about what to do with the data many of their fitness-tracking patients are bringing them."Clinicians can't do a lot with the number of steps you've taken in a day," Neil Sehgal, a senior research scientist at UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation said. Andrew Trister, an oncologist and researcher at Sage Bionetworks echoed this sentiment. "[Patients] come in with these very large Excel spreadsheets, with all this information," he said. "I have no idea what to do with that."
One of the short-term problems for trackers is that their [sic] not actually reliable enough to be medically useful. The sorts of measurements that devices cheap enough to be commercial products tend only to focus on vague metrics that could just as easily be inferred from a short interview or basic examination. While certain health trackers have shown promise—such as the small implants that manage insulin for diabetics—they can also produce a hyper-vigilance and paranoia, leading to a degenerative process of over-managing issues that a person's body is already handling.
Are there Soylentils that do use fitness trackers regularly? Do they help you manage your health?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:46PM
I got the UP24 more than a year ago, and it got upgraded to UP2 a couple months ago. They all do the same thing: they report to me how much exercise I performed every day. Jawbone trackers also record the sleep (phases and duration), and the software tracks the food that one eats. The weight is also recorded, but you have to measure it yourself. All in all, it is a convenient package. The doctor does not need to have any of that data, unless you complain about the diet. The device is useful only to motivate yourself and to keep track of your progress. Without a tracker you could walk to the store and back and say "that's about 10,000 steps, so I'm done for the day." The tracker will honestly tell you that you walked only 3,200 steps and you need to walk a bit more to get to the number that you selected. Every engineer knows that you cannot control a process if you cannot measure it. The fitness band is the measurement tool. The control is still in your head.