One major drawback of wearables is that, like all technology, they are addictive. People become obsessed, which increases their screen time. I remember when I used to wear one, I would constantly check it during a workout to see what my heart rate was, and worry when it was clearly not measuring it right. I would get frustrated when I wore it on a hike, and it wouldn't count my steps right if I was using hiking poles. We don't need wearables to know whether we're exercising enough, or too much, or how many steps we've taken in a day. We have a much better sensor between our ears. There is a danger in thinking that if it works for some, it will work for all. I heard a story from a neighbour about how it saved someone's life because it alerted to a heart rate anomaly. I also know someone who went to an emergency room thinking they had a heart rate anomaly because of an Apple Watch alert, and it wasn't true. So while it works for some, it cannot be extrapolated to the whole population. I expected JFK to understand that. So when a government official who should know better suddenly starts saying "everyone should have one", I get suspicious about his motives.
Agreed. We would also need in-depth research on the false positives generated by everyday wearables if we'd start to act on their alarms. Based on observational evidence, the false positive rate appears to be high.
We also need to educate the public on precision of values, or lack thereof. For example, you can sync a fitbit to myfitnesspal and let it calculate your calorie deficit. So if you do that, you're using average values of calories for food groups, estimate the calories of the foods you eat and then subtract an estimated metabolic rate calorie burn, and an estimated calorie burn from fitbit activity. So that's error upon error upon error. It is living in hope of error cancelation, and it is not the biblical kind of hope. But people treat it like those numbers are sacred and infallible, "because science".
It is astonishing indeed how much more the public trusts numbers than verbal statements. Any message that includes something like "increase by 4.1 percent" will be seen by many as inherently more trustworthy than the same message without that detail, because it reads like a message that is backed up hard scientific evidence. Of course, in reality the number may be made up, be derived from models only meant to fit to political bias, or may be the result of very imprecise measurement. Maybe that is worthwhile a post by itself.
One major drawback of wearables is that, like all technology, they are addictive. People become obsessed, which increases their screen time. I remember when I used to wear one, I would constantly check it during a workout to see what my heart rate was, and worry when it was clearly not measuring it right. I would get frustrated when I wore it on a hike, and it wouldn't count my steps right if I was using hiking poles. We don't need wearables to know whether we're exercising enough, or too much, or how many steps we've taken in a day. We have a much better sensor between our ears. There is a danger in thinking that if it works for some, it will work for all. I heard a story from a neighbour about how it saved someone's life because it alerted to a heart rate anomaly. I also know someone who went to an emergency room thinking they had a heart rate anomaly because of an Apple Watch alert, and it wasn't true. So while it works for some, it cannot be extrapolated to the whole population. I expected JFK to understand that. So when a government official who should know better suddenly starts saying "everyone should have one", I get suspicious about his motives.
Agreed. We would also need in-depth research on the false positives generated by everyday wearables if we'd start to act on their alarms. Based on observational evidence, the false positive rate appears to be high.
We also need to educate the public on precision of values, or lack thereof. For example, you can sync a fitbit to myfitnesspal and let it calculate your calorie deficit. So if you do that, you're using average values of calories for food groups, estimate the calories of the foods you eat and then subtract an estimated metabolic rate calorie burn, and an estimated calorie burn from fitbit activity. So that's error upon error upon error. It is living in hope of error cancelation, and it is not the biblical kind of hope. But people treat it like those numbers are sacred and infallible, "because science".
It is astonishing indeed how much more the public trusts numbers than verbal statements. Any message that includes something like "increase by 4.1 percent" will be seen by many as inherently more trustworthy than the same message without that detail, because it reads like a message that is backed up hard scientific evidence. Of course, in reality the number may be made up, be derived from models only meant to fit to political bias, or may be the result of very imprecise measurement. Maybe that is worthwhile a post by itself.