Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Fitness Trackers, Ranked

I'm in the market for a new fitness tracker.  I've had my Nike FuelBand for 1,001 days. It's now a pretty low feature activity shamer....that's it.

In my search for the perfect fitness tracker, I built a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has 33 trackers, with 24 columns of features. I weight each column according to importance to me, and the resulting "STATISTIC" shows me which fitness tracker is the one I should purchase.

I included many different types: watches, bands, clips.

I included fitness trackers with both rechargeable and replaceable batteries. However, this proved difficult to since I couldn't purely weight battery life. How do I compare 180 of replaceable battery life to 7 days of rechargeable battery life?

Here are the tracked features ordered by importance to me
Heart rate tracking (by the fitness tracker, not by an accompanying band)
Battery Life
Sleep tracking (automatically)
Food integration (ability to pull in data from an app like LoseIt!, MyFitnessPal or Jawbone UP)
Text notifications
Call notifications
iOS compatible
Move reminders
Music control
Waterproof
Web interface/dashboard
Perspiration tracking
Bluetooth 4.0 sync
Steps tracking
Calories burned tracking
Distance tracking
Active minutes tracking
Price

Price matters a lot more than that, but because the data gathered on price was the actual price (ranging from $30-390), and the data gathered on all the other features was a binary Yes/No, I had to weight price a lot less to avoid it becoming the driving factor.

Here's what my STATISTIC produced:

1. Basis Peak, 420
2. Xiaomi Mi Band, 402
3. Fitbit Surge, 395
4. Withings Pulse, 393
5. Garmin Vivosmart, 370
6. Jawbone UP24, 362
7. Jawbone Up3, 357
8. Fitbit Charge HR, 345
9. Microsoft Band, 345
10. Pebble Steel, 331
11. Garmin vivofit, 317
12. Samsung Gear Fit, 302
13. Lenovo Smartband SW-B100, 295
14. Razer Nabu, 280
15. iFit Active fitness tracker, 273
16. Fitbit Flex, 260
17. Fitbit One, 260
18. Fitbit Charge, 242
19. Apple Watch, 235
20. LG Lifeband Touch, 215
21. Fitbit Zip, 209
22. Polar Loop, 189
23. Nike Fuelband SE+, 171
24. i.am PULS, 145
25. Moto 360, 100

I didn't do the in depth research to find out how good the different trackers are at tracking data like heart rate, but I've been reading many reviews. For example, the Microsoft Band has some iffy results on heart rate tracking.

Winner: Basis Peak Watch

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