Steps

A few weekends ago, I was challenged by a friend to do more steps than him. Of course, I won ;-) But I noticed he was wearing his activity tracker on his wrist while I was wearing mine on my waist. As I noticed several times before, when I had an activity tracker on my wrist, these devices tend to capture some movements even if you don’t actually walk (while typing energetically on the computer or while driving for instance). So I took the opportunity of a small trip to wear 2 activity trackers, one Fitbit One on my waist and one Fitbit Charge HR on my wrist.

After abandoning my Fitbit device in January because using it didn’t see improvement in my weight (see previous post), I was wondering if I could still measure my risk to develop cardiovascular diseases and other preventable chronic diseases (diabetes e.g.). So, still sitting at my desk (something I do for more than 8 hours a day in theory - probably more in practice), I looked into the ways to monitor my risk for these diseases …

2013 is near its end and it’s time to see what happened during the last 360 days or so. Many things happened (graduated from MBA, new house, holidays, ill a few days, …) but I wanted to know if one could quantify these changes and how these changes would impact my daily physical activity. For that purpose I bought a Fitbit One in March 2013. I chose Fitbit over other devices available because of the price (99 USD at the time) and because it was available in Europe (via a Dutch vendor). At that time the Jawbone Up was unavailable (even in the USA) and the Nike Fuelband couldn’t track my sleep. ...