"How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?"
"One. But the light bulb has to really *want* to change."
If ponying up $500 is what it takes to change your behavior, I say, go for it. Me, I'd spend it on three pairs of running shoes, or a really good bike fit and aerobar, or a year's worth of pool time, or some of those Air Relax leg pumps.
I've been using it. I think it's a beta product, but they would probably disagree with me. They have a bunch of high profile endorsements at the professional sports level (NBA, MLB).
The device measures sleep, resting heart rate, HRV, and strain from daily exercise. One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is the optical HR monitor. It's just not accurate, fluctuates quite a bit and has a lot of data spikes. They introduced it as a wrist-based product, but I expect it to move to a bicep or other location one of these days. When I swim, the typical HR records in the 180-200 range for me, but I know it should be much closer to 120 bpm. When comparing the data to a Garmin HR strap, you can easily see the huge fluctuations due to bad data. You can't adjust, modify or export the bad data. It uses max HR data in many of the algorithms, so if that's off, all the stress metrics are wrong.
It doesn't record sleep that well for me. It thinks I wake up in the middle of the night and don't go back to sleep again. That's easy to fix, and I update that every morning.
It records HRV data and resting HR data, which really interest me for stress metrics. The problem is that there seems to be a lag in my reaction to stress, so for example, on my long bike day the data will show moderately high stress, the next day it will show that I'm moderately stressed with a falling HRV and increasing resting HR. Two days after the long ride it will tell me to take it easy as my HRV and HR data fall further. After that, I'm good to go according to the data. Logically, I should work hard on the long bike day, take it easy the next day and then get back to hard work again.
I hoped to be able to better measure stress more objectively than the typical bike metrics in the PMC chart, but for now, at least, it's interesting data, but not actionable.
A user set up a private Facebook group that you can join if you want to learn more about the product. Many of the users in the group seem to be new to fitness gadgets, metrics, and big data in general. I've been a power meter user for 10+ years, a data geek forever and have much higher expectations than many others.
Comments
"One. But the light bulb has to really *want* to change."
If ponying up $500 is what it takes to change your behavior, I say, go for it. Me, I'd spend it on three pairs of running shoes, or a really good bike fit and aerobar, or a year's worth of pool time, or some of those Air Relax leg pumps.
The device measures sleep, resting heart rate, HRV, and strain from daily exercise. One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is the optical HR monitor. It's just not accurate, fluctuates quite a bit and has a lot of data spikes. They introduced it as a wrist-based product, but I expect it to move to a bicep or other location one of these days. When I swim, the typical HR records in the 180-200 range for me, but I know it should be much closer to 120 bpm. When comparing the data to a Garmin HR strap, you can easily see the huge fluctuations due to bad data. You can't adjust, modify or export the bad data. It uses max HR data in many of the algorithms, so if that's off, all the stress metrics are wrong.
It doesn't record sleep that well for me. It thinks I wake up in the middle of the night and don't go back to sleep again. That's easy to fix, and I update that every morning.
It records HRV data and resting HR data, which really interest me for stress metrics. The problem is that there seems to be a lag in my reaction to stress, so for example, on my long bike day the data will show moderately high stress, the next day it will show that I'm moderately stressed with a falling HRV and increasing resting HR. Two days after the long ride it will tell me to take it easy as my HRV and HR data fall further. After that, I'm good to go according to the data. Logically, I should work hard on the long bike day, take it easy the next day and then get back to hard work again.
I hoped to be able to better measure stress more objectively than the typical bike metrics in the PMC chart, but for now, at least, it's interesting data, but not actionable.
A user set up a private Facebook group that you can join if you want to learn more about the product. Many of the users in the group seem to be new to fitness gadgets, metrics, and big data in general. I've been a power meter user for 10+ years, a data geek forever and have much higher expectations than many others.
Tom