By Jill E. Duffy
The frenzy started a little over a decade ago. It was 2012, and I was working as a technology product reviewer. Brand after brand would email to tell me about their health and fitness products. Would I like to test and write about a new pedometer that connects to a smart phone? How about a smart bathroom scale? Or socks that track your runs? Or a smart sports bra?
The promise was that these gadgets would radically improve health care. By collecting data on factors such as physical activity, sleep, heart rate, body temperature, weight, food intake, and one day maybe even the pollutants in our environment, doctors would be armed with a wealth of information via synced health portals, and we’d have truly personalized medical assessments.
For almost 10 years, I tested and wrote about all these devices and services. I imagined a hopeful future, but my hands-on experiences left me disappointed, skeptical, and increasingly worried about people’s safety and privacy. For example, I sent in a sample of my poop for analysis and was told that my microbiome indicated I might be gluten-intolerant, even though I’m clearly not. The results were wrong, and the company now had my data to use to try and improve its service. Another time, a company analyzed my blood in an effort to “optimize” my health through dietary recommendations, although a nutritionist I met with for a second opinion convinced me that some of the information could be harmful. If the amount of calcium in my blood was too high, she said, I needed medical testing, not less dairy in my diet.
While I don’t think the world will benefit from workout pants with butt sensors, I have learned which devices and data are truly useful for me as I age. After years of weighing their value, here are the things I still use and find genuinely helpful.
A 24/7 Heart Rate Monitor
Most smart watches and fitness trackers include a 24/7 heart rate (HR) monitor. Those little flashing lights on the back track your resting heart rate as well as your heart rate during exercise – two data points I’m interested in monitoring, especially as I age. I wear a Garmin Venu Sq, which is no longer sold, but really any device with a HR monitor will do.
At any medical exam, a nurse or med tech will take your HR, and it’s good to pay attention to it. However, you can learn more about yourself by monitoring your HR more frequently. For example, I’ve learned that my resting HR increases by a lot when I get sick, going from around 55bpm to more than 80. Now I know to slow down, stay home, and pay attention to my body any time my resting HR rises above 65bpm.
I also use HR data during exercise. According to Harvard Medical School, weight-bearing aerobic activity helps prevent bone loss in women over 40 the same as weight lifting, and going faster is more beneficial. I do a bare-minimum 25-minute interval training workout with weights three to four times a week; to make sure it counts, I glance at my HR until I push it above 140bpm whenever I jump rope, hit the mat for burpees, or do anything else aerobic. Without a number to target, I’d have a much harder time motivating myself to work out sufficiently.
Blood Pressure Cuff
At-home blood pressure cuffs have become surprisingly affordable, accurate, and simple to use. Most are battery operated and come with clear instructions. You don’t need one with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connectivity. Just get one that’s FDA-approved (the one I use is from Omron). Take a reading and type the numbers you see into whatever health app you use. Apple Health, Garmin Connect, and others have a place for blood pressure and use color-coding to tell you if your reading is in the healthy range. You can even jot down your blood pressure readings in a notebook or a spreadsheet and look them up on a blood pressure chart. Information doesn’t have to be high-tech for it to matter.
Having a history of your blood pressure readings is helpful if you go to a doctor’s appointment and get an unexpectedly high or low number. You know your baseline, and in a case like that, you could share your prior readings with your doctor and discuss which device you use and how you use it. A good doctor will rule out the possibility of a faulty device or user error before anything else. Your doctor can also advise you about what your blood pressure numbers should be and how to get them there.
Pulse Oximeter
A pulse oximeter measures the oxygen saturation level of your blood and usually gives a HR reading as well. It’s a little battery-operated device that you clip onto your finger. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to believe that having one is a vital part of any first-aid kit, right alongside a thermometer, especially if anyone in your home is susceptible to or has a harder time recovering from respiratory illnesses.
While I don’t use a pulse oximeter daily, I do leave it on my bedside table when I or someone in my house is sick. Seeing your oxygen saturation number dip can be an early indicator that it’s time to see a doctor.
Like a blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeters don’t have to be fancy or connected, though you should get one that’s FDA-approved. You can buy a decent one at most pharmacies for less than $25.
The Data I Take With a Grain of Salt
Having tested so many fitness trackers, running watches, and other devices, I’ve learned that some data can be useful if you accept them for what they are.
Step counting is one example. Consumers have complained endlessly about how inaccurate step counters are, whether they don’t track when someone is pushing a stroller or overcount when brushing your teeth. (Sometimes a device just needs to be rebooted or recalibrated.) I still find step counting useful as long as I focus less on the exact number and more on relative patterns. If I average 11,000 steps per day, and one day my step reading is 6,500, I can assume I got less activity than normal. There’s nothing wrong with establishing a baseline for yourself and trying to reach or exceed it regularly, even if the number is technically off.
Sleep data is another example. Finding out whether you were in a REM phase during the time that your watch says you were is impossible without going into a sleep lab. However, any device that tracks sleep will give you reasonably accurate data about some aspects of sleep, such as what time you go to bed. If you’re trying to resolve sleep problems, going to bed at a consistent time is usually among the first steps. So while all your sleep data may not be precise, the information you do get can still be useful.
Weight is the last piece of data that I track, but only casually. Like many Gen X women, it’s taken me decades to shake off the stigma of weight, so I don’t like to weigh myself daily. But I do like having a Wi-Fi connected scale — I have a Garmin Index — that sends my readings directly to an app where I can see the broad strokes of how my weight is trending without obsessing over it.
Realistic Expectations
As with so many tech-industry dreams, health and fitness devices overpromised and underdelivered. That doesn’t mean they’re all useless, though. Getting to know your body and capturing some data about it can still be to your benefit, especially as our bodies change with age.