New Delhi: In a big setback for those who depend on activity trackers and smartwatches for fitness, a new research suggests that popular wearables, including the Apple Watch Series 6, the Fitbit Sense and The Polar Vantage V showed poor accuracy while tracking calories. According to the research published in the European Journal of Sport Science and summarised by Stronger by Science, the widely popular wearable devices were inaccurate at tracking calories during almost all activities.
This research included 60 young individuals, including 30 men and 30 women around 25 years of age and they were engaged in activities such as sitting, walking, running, cycling, and resistance training to calculate energy expenditure ratings.
"Unfortunately, the researchers found that these wearable devices were pretty disappointing when it comes to estimating energy expenditure. Given all of the different ways they quantified device agreement and different types of errors, we could drown in a sea of numbers here. However, the quantitative interpretation of these numbers isn’t particularly intuitive, and I don’t want us to miss the forest for the trees. So, I have adapted a table to concisely summarize the energy expenditure results using the authors’ own categorized criteria for interpreting the values," Stronger By Science wrote on its page.
The researchers mentioned that the three mentioned wearables poorly measured energy expenditure for all of the five activities and general fitness enthusiasts, health professionals, athletes and coaches should not even consider the calorie readings of the Apple Watch Series 6, the Fitbit Sense and the Polar Vantage V.
However, when it comes to heart rate tracking, the Apple Watch Series 6 was highly accurate while tracking heart rate during all activities. The Polar Vantage V and Fitbit Sense showed some sort of variation depending on different activities. Also, the step tracking of the three mentioned wearables was pretty accurate.