Your Fitness Tracker Isn’t As Accurate As You Think It Is

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If you’re using a fitness tracker in an effort to shed a few pounds, we have some unfortunate news for you. Even the fancier (read: expensive) ones that monitor your heart rate successfully do a poor job of measuring the calories you burn on any given day.

In a new study from Standford University, researchers evaluated the effectiveness of the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and Samsung Gear S2 used by 60 participants. The study group was diverse in age, skin tone, size and weight to best represent a general population.

When it came to measuring heart rates, six of the seven devices performed with an error rate of less than 5 percent, which is pretty damn good. However, when measuring energy expended by the participants, every device fell short and in big ways. The best of the bunch was the FitBit Surge, which still gave an error rate of 27.4 percent. And the PulseOn was by far the worst performer, coming in with an error rate of 92.6 percent. Yikes. 

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The problem here is that many people who choose to wear these activity trackers use the data they gather from them to inform their lifestyle decisions. It’s how they determine what to eat for lunch and what workout they should complete after work. They even share the data with their doctors to help inform certain medical decisions.

And another issue is that no one really knows why the calorie measurements on these devices are so far off. They clearly do a poor job of identifying different modes of exercise and the calorie burn accomplished by them, but isn’t that crucial for a successful activity tracker?

At the end of the day, it’s still worth wearing them to track your heart rate, keep count of those steps and even measure the number of miles you cover from sunrise to sunset. But you should probably track your diet separately and not use your device’s calorie reader to justify any major splurges (looking at you, gourmet donuts).