Wearable Deep Dive

The intersection of tech and fitness

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In a world of infinitely expanding information, actionable data should be the key attribute we measure our data transformations by. Otherwise, why would we collect, clean, analyze, and present the data? Different brands have different goals - some focus purely on tracking and improving users’ fitness, whereas others take a more holistic approach and include specific data that encompasses ‘health’. Such as the Oura ring, pairing with Natural Cycles to collect a temperature trend to provide an absolute value to calculate a user’s daily fertility status.

This post aims to explore the current market and key metrics that you all commonly use (thank you for your feedback). Additionally, we’ll analyze their use cases for the military, civilian athletes, and the average American. We’ll also develop an understanding of what they do well, tradeoffs they make, and what they flat out don’t get right. This is not a post to sell you on any particular brand, I am unsponsored. Rather, I’m fascinated by the intersection of tech and health and hope to deliver some of my research and what I enjoy to you. Today we’ll cover:

• Overview of pros + cons to the most used devices

• Human Desire

• Branding

• What wearables get wrong

• The bare minimum to track effectively without using a wearable

• What I recommend if just getting into fitness wearables

Let’s begin.

The human desire to quantify is not uncommon - rather it’s deeply ingrained in society. Arguably, it goes back to the idea of logic originated by Aristotle over 2300 years ago. But the most simple measurement is time, which we often forget when talking about wearables. But there are two perspectives we can look at them. One being the shift in societal use of watches to smart watches, the other being wearable tech. Although smart watches fall under the spectrum of wearable tech, they’re a bit of a different category - including features like notifications, emails/texting, calling, maps, music, etc. Some of the devices we look at will fall in this category, blending in wearable tech focused on health and fitness. But at their most simple form, they’re still watches. Designed to tell us the time. And hopefully still maintain a decent form factor that looks good in many environments.

But the desire to wear technology to quantify our lives is rooted in the need for understanding, comparison, and decision-making.

Quantification provides concrete, numerical information that allows for easy comparison and ranking, facilitating decision making in the absence of more detailed, contextual information. We adjust our behavior based on the metrics we’re held against. Anything measured compels us to optimize our score on that metric.

Our bank account measures our liquid worth, and we optimize for more. In competitive career paths, people quantify hours worked, and either optimize for more or less. This desire to measure everything is evident in various fields such as human rights. Where there is a need to quantify and measure impacts in a meaningful and robust way but has historically been measured qualitatively. This includes measuring data that provides a stronger indicator of actual impacts on people and underlying structural factors that can be determiners of human rights risks. The urge to measure and quantify is driven by the aim to understand the world better, interact with the surroundings, and improve life. However, similar to forgetting about telling time, we can also forget about the qualitative factors when we become so focused on metrics. With human rights, organizations can become so focused on numbers that they forget to ask the simple question “how do you feel?” With fitness wearables it’s the same problem - we often get caught up in the numbers that we forget to self assess how we actually feel, opting to outsource our daily feeling of well being to a number on a screen.

Of course outsourcing our well-being to a screen isn’t new - just ask anyone who is constantly checking their instagram for a new like or comment - or how many views their tiktok got - which will be the determining factor in how happy they are that day.

I digress.

Quantification has also advanced science and health/fitness in several ways. In the field of exercise science and health, statistics and quantification continue to play a crucial role in understanding fitness outcomes and assessing the effectiveness of physical activity interventions.

Meta-analyses for example, are used to quantitatively synthesize cardiorespiratory fitness outcomes of motivational physical activity interventions, providing valuable insights into the impact of these interventions. In the context of health sciences, quantification is integrated into programs such as healthy lifestyles and fitness science, providing students with the necessary skills for employment in health-related fields. In the broader context of science, quantification has significantly contributed to the understanding of fitness outcomes, the effectiveness of health interventions, and the advancement of scientific knowledge in various domains.

The actual history of wearables focusing on health and human performance optimization goes back to the late 1960s and early 1970s when the first portable computer was invented. In 1994, Steve Mann created the "wearable wireless webcam," leading the first example of wearable technology designed for everyday use. Going into the 2000s, we aw an explosion in wearable technology with the introduction of fitness trackers and smartwatches. The 2010s were a tipping point for wearable technology with the dominance of wearable devices like fitness trackers and smartwatches. These devices have significantly contributed to health and human performance optimization by enabling the monitoring of various metrics such as heart rate, temperature, oxygen saturation, and stress levels. This also ties heavily to my previous article American Dynamism. The information revolution and accompanying growth in compute power allowed for hardware developments into the 2000s.

So where does that leave us now?