Fitbit: Your Personal Health Monitor
The Fitbit is a revolutionary, little personal health monitor. Looking like a clip approximately the size of a finger, the Fitbit contains a 3D motion sensor like those found in the Nintendo Wii, and accurately tracks your movements throughout the day. It can calculate the intensity and duration of your physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, and distance traveled.
You also wear the Fitbit at night, and it measures microtremors along your wrist in addition to the normal movement tracking functions to assess how long it took you to fall asleep and how many times you woke up during the night.
The Fitbit also wirelessly syncs to your PC or Mac via an included docking station and uploads your data to it’s tracking software. As you can imagine, this is insanely useful data to keep, and the Fitbit looks to make keeping track of this kind of stuff a breeze.
How accurate is the Fitbit? The company manufacturing it claims it to be one of the most accurate pedometers on the market, scoring on average 95%-97% accuracy. And when you sleep, the tracker has been shown to correlate strongly with results from polysomnograms, the kinds of tests sleep labs administer.
The Fitbit is currently available for pre-order through its website for $99. It will be available in late December or early January, and I think I’m seriously going to pre-order one right now.
