I am not an early adopter of technology. I was late to cell phones (fear of being out of touch not compelling to me), then late to a smartphone (flip phone still worked). I was late to a CD player (my brother finally gave me one for Christmas). And now I’m one of the few people in my office not wearing a fitness tracker. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t overhear a conversation about how many steps someone has taken or how many hours of sleep they got. And I feel left out, but not enough to go get one.
Fitness trackers are basically pedometers with a bigger Cool Quotient. The inexpensive ones don’t do much more than count steps. But what if I want my bike ride to count as activity? That’s a fancier, more expensive device. The kind I would consider is the one with built-in GPS that allows me to monitor my running pace and distance. But these are almost like wearing a small lunchbox on your arm. I’d use it for my run and then have to take it off. I certainly wouldn’t be sleeping with it on; it would bias my amount of ‘restless’ time because it’d be so annoying.
The main point of a fitness tracker is to motivate people to be more active. But in my logical mind, if I’m already active, I don’t need the motivation. I get up and go to the gym five days a week and trail run one more. More than not needing the motivation, I fear that hyper-attention to something also brings unwanted consequences. I think it might be interesting to know how much sleep I get, but I’m a great sleeper so tracking sleep statistics is like messing with something not broken. Maybe I just object to all the data in general… I just want to ‘be’.
And as for being a slow adopter of technology, it is not without benefits. For example, I totally skipped Blu-Ray and moved right into online streaming of movies. Regarding fitness trackers, I read an article yesterday about how people using them are quite possibly compromising more of their privacy. I have some secrets to maintain…my excellent resting heart rate being one of them.
Fitness trackers are basically pedometers with a bigger Cool Quotient. The inexpensive ones don’t do much more than count steps. But what if I want my bike ride to count as activity? That’s a fancier, more expensive device. The kind I would consider is the one with built-in GPS that allows me to monitor my running pace and distance. But these are almost like wearing a small lunchbox on your arm. I’d use it for my run and then have to take it off. I certainly wouldn’t be sleeping with it on; it would bias my amount of ‘restless’ time because it’d be so annoying.
The main point of a fitness tracker is to motivate people to be more active. But in my logical mind, if I’m already active, I don’t need the motivation. I get up and go to the gym five days a week and trail run one more. More than not needing the motivation, I fear that hyper-attention to something also brings unwanted consequences. I think it might be interesting to know how much sleep I get, but I’m a great sleeper so tracking sleep statistics is like messing with something not broken. Maybe I just object to all the data in general… I just want to ‘be’.
And as for being a slow adopter of technology, it is not without benefits. For example, I totally skipped Blu-Ray and moved right into online streaming of movies. Regarding fitness trackers, I read an article yesterday about how people using them are quite possibly compromising more of their privacy. I have some secrets to maintain…my excellent resting heart rate being one of them.