Fitness tracker accuracy

Here is an interesting new study on the accuracy of fitness trackers (via HN), putting the overall accuracy across all evaluated devices at only 67%.

This is not very good (the usual suspects — Fitbit, Apple, and Garmin — are better at around 80% accuracy, depending on the metric) but I also agree with this commenter’s view on HN: as long as you are using your fitness tracker mostly for motivation¹ it does not really matter how accurate individual measurements are. It’s more important that overall trends can be checked. If, for example, the step count is systematically over- or underestimated you can still get much use out of tracking, because you can still check whether your new jogging schedule moves the needle as much as you think it does.²

It’s the measuring itself, and the difference you feel that is also backed up by data, that does most for my motivation.

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