Jawbone UP

In the current world of sharing and documenting everything, it seems we have fewer and fewer hugs, face to face chats, or verbal conversations.  My life is an open book via this blog and facebook posts. I text on my phone much more than I talk.

And now I am tracking every moment if sleep and every step I take.

A patient of mine works for apple, and offered me a great deal on the Jawbone UP.  It's a glorified pedometer: a bracelet that I wear that counts the steps I take each day.  It calculates how many calories I burn.  It tells me how much I sleep and how much of that sleep is light vs deep sleep.  It bases this information on micromovements and vibrations sensed by the bracelet.  I could also use it to help me track my food intake but I don't do that.  I can connect it to my iphone or my ipad and then look at lots of advice, data, graphs and such to analyze my life and fitness goals.

I have done this for about 2 weeks, and I am appalled at how little activity I do in a day and how little I sleep compared to what I expected.  Granted, I am 38 weeks pregnant, it's 100 degrees outside, I am not comfortable, and I have put on 33 pounds this pregnancy.  So I am way less active than I have ever been before, and sleep can be a challenge.  But still, I thought I had a fairly active job and an active life, and that walking 10,000 steps per day would be an achievable goal.  After all, getting Rachel ready to go in the morning = 500 steps.  But I have not reached 10,000 steps yet.  I am far less active during my work day than I thought.  So I am curious to see how things go post partum.

I do love looking at my results and I do get motivated to compete with the numbers and try to walk or sleep more.

In case you are curious, there are 3 competing gadgets out there, and many of my patients are curious about mine.  Nike has a bracelet called the fuel band, and another popular device is a fit bit, which is worn as a clip to your clothing.  There are some pros and cons to each one, and it seems my patient conversations include listing each of these frequently in a day.  Interestingly, the fit bit seems to give people more credit for a given activity.  The Nike fuel band gives credit for arm swinging only, so if your arms are stationary, or holding something, you might not get credit for an activity.  But you might log activity while doing something like brushing your teeth vigorously.  The jawbone takes arm swing and overall motion into account, but tends to give less credit for some activities and I am not sure why.

I would love to wear all 3 devices and a heart rate monitor and a GPS watch for a week and have some fun experiments.

So, in this experiment so far, I have decided that these tools can be very effective motivators for the average folks.  For Jason, for example, I think it would be stupid since his world is already tracked via a garmin GPS watch that tracks his mileage, pace, and elevation for every run (or even bike or swim).  But for someone like, say my mom, logging steps in a day and making a goal around that might be a great tool for being more active and healthier.

I also think it won't be long before one device is a watch, phone, GPS mileage and pace tracker, sleep monitor, heart rate monitor, and pedometer.  Hopefully in one small little comfortable necklace or
wrist band.  Then one device could track everything, and we could have enough data on ourselves to waste even more time in a day!