The Wellness Center's Blog

Use Wearable Health Technology to Support Your Fitness Goals

By: Dexter Wellness Center

November 1, 2016, 9:00 am - Categories: Fitness Tips

As you work toward your health and fitness goals, wearable health technology can help you collect data to keep you informed of your starting points and your progress. These devices collect data and they help their users feel more engaged in their health and lifestyle choices. They can also assist healthcare professionals by providing contextual, continuous data that can help improve the analysis of a patient’s health (Fischer, 2016).

Most wearable tech is worn on the wrist, but there are devices that can be clipped on the body or hung around your neck. Watches, rings, pendants and smart clothing have sensors that are used to connect to you and provide information about your health and fitness. They can record your heart rate, body fat composition, perspiration, health, temperature and muscle activity all by just touching your skin as well as movement, distance and speed using GPS, accelerometers and gyroscopes (Sung, 2015).

Here are three popular types of wearable tech can support your fitness goals:

Fitness trackers                                       

Usually worn on the wrist or clipped to your body, these trackers keep count of the number of steps you make each day and more. This can help you to monitor your progress and set goals in your fitness routine.  Fitbit, Jawbone, Misfit and Withings are popular brands for fitness trackers (Sung, 2015).

Sports watches

Athletes and active types should use sports watches for running, cycling, swimming and more. These watches keep up with all your active movements and many are GPS-enabled to track your stats and send information to your smartphone. TomTom, Garmin, Polar and Suunto are popular brands for sports watches (Sung, 2015).

Smartwatches

These watches are connected to your smartphone to not only alert you of phone calls, but provide social media, message and email notifications. These watches can also mirror features of a sports watch or fitness trackers with tracking movement. Apple, Samsung, Fossil, Nixon and Casio are popular brands for smartwatches (Sung, 2015).

These options of wearable health technology can put you in control of your health and fitness.

References

Fischer, D. (2016, January 8). 4 Benefits of Wearable Health Technology. Retrieved from medicomhealth: https://medicomhealth.com/4-benefits-of-wearable-health-technologys/

Sung, D. (2015, August 3). What is wearable tech? Everything you need to know explained. Retrieved from Wareable.com: https://www.wareable.com/wearable-tech/what-is-wearable-tech-753