Do fitness trackers, smartwatches make people more active and healthier? Not really

WGlobal sales of fitness trackers increased from US$14 billion in 2017 to more than $36 billion in 2020. The dizzying success of these devices suggests that more people than ever see value in monitoring the number of steps they take, the flights of stairs they climb, the time they spend sitting, and the calories they burn.

The manufacturers of these devices certainly want consumers to believe that tracking fitness or health-related behaviors will prompt them to increase their activity levels and make them healthier.

Our review of published research over the past 25 years suggests otherwise.

We are professors of kinesiology, the science of movement of the human body, in Boise Statethe university of tennessee and the University of North Florida. To find out if and how physical activity has changed in the years since fitness trackers became popular, we looked at more than two decades of research from various industrialized nations, all conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic.

reviewing the research

To conduct the study, we first looked for published research that tracked physical activity, such as walking, household activities, or playing sports throughout the day. We wanted studies that took two “snapshots” of a population’s daily activity, with the measurements separated by at least a year.

We found 16 studies from eight different countries that met these criteria: Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. The studies were conducted between 1995 and 2017.

It is important to note that these snapshots did not track specific individuals. Rather, they tracked samples from people in the same age group. For example, a Japanese study of physical activity among adults ages 20 to 90 collected data each year for 22 years from people in each age group.

The scientists tracked the participants’ physical activity using a variety of wearable devices, from simple pedometers (step counters) to more sophisticated activity monitors like accelerometers.

Study groups ranged from large nationally representative samples of tens of thousands of people to small samples of several hundred students from a few local schools.

After identifying the research studies, we calculated an ‘effect size’ for each study. Effect size is a method of fitting the data to allow an “apples to apples” comparison. To calculate the effect size, we used the data reported in the studies. These include the average physical activity at the beginning and end of each study, the sample size, and a measure of variability in physical activity. Using a technique called meta-analysis, this allowed us to combine the results of all the studies to arrive at an overall trend.

We found that, overall, the researchers documented fairly consistent declines in physical activity, with similar declines in each geographic region and in both genders. Overall, the decline in physical activity per person was more than 1,100 steps per day between 1995 and 2017.

Our most surprising finding was the sharp decline in physical activity among adolescents ages 11 to 19, by about 30%, in the span of a single generation. For example, when we compared studies that reported physical activity in steps per day, we found that total steps per day per decade decreased by an average of 608 steps per day in adults, 823 steps per day in children, and 1,497 steps per day. in adolescents. .

Our study does not address why physical activity has decreased in the last 25 years. However, the studies we reviewed did mention some contributing factors.

More looking at screens, less walking or biking

Among adolescents, decreases in physical activity were associated with increases in the ownership and use of smartphones, tablets, video games, and social media.

In the US, for example, screen time increased dramatically in teens, from five hours a day in 1999 for 8.8 hours per day in 2017.

At school, most of the physical activity that adolescents do has traditionally come from physical education classes. However, changes in the frequency of physical education classes during the study period are inconsistent and vary from country to country.

All of these factors may help explain the decrease in physical activity that we observed in our study.

Also, fewer adults and children walk or bike to school or work than 25 years ago. For example, in the late 1960s, most American children ages 5 to 14 biked or walked to school. Since then, this “active transportation” has largely been replaced by car travel. Fees for school bus or public transportation have seen little change.

So why use a fitness tracker?

So if fitness levels have declined at the same time fitness tracking has grown in popularity, what makes these devices useful?

Fitness trackers can help increase people’s awareness of their daily physical activity. However, these devices are only part of the solution to address the problem of sedentary lifestyle. They are facilitators, rather than drivers, of behavior change.

When a person’s physical activity decreases, it opens the door to reduced fitness levels in general and other health problems such as obesity or diabetes. On the other hand, physical activity has a dramatic positive impact on health and well-being. The first step to increasing active movement is to measure it, which these devices can do. But successfully increasing one’s overall physical activity requires several additional factors, such as goal setting, self-monitoring, positive feedback, and social support.

This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the Original article.