How Wearing a Fitness Tracker Can Change You

Lately, a big market for fitness trackers has emerged. Different wearables and apps can measure a number of fitness-related parameters, including heart rate, GPS tracking, steps, distance covered, pace, calories burned or even sleep quality. In many cases, you can also log your caloric intake to get an even better profile of your performance. But the psychological aspect of fitness trackers is just as important as the technology behind them because they do more than inform: they reinforce, motivate and reward.

The Advertised Effects
Fitness trackers and apps are advertised as beneficial for your health and lifestyle. They provide an objective measure of your activity so you can’t lie to yourself. Wearable trackers should get you to be more active, motivate you during exercise and provide information about your daily routine or workout without requiring manual calculations or notes. Furthermore, they should help you to reach your fitness goals.
These devices and apps are becoming increasingly popular in personal healthcare and promise easy lifestyle changes. These promising words fall on fertile soil. Most adults are aware of (or at least suspect) not meeting their recommended daily activity guidelines. However, there are no objective research results to bolster up their promise of improving physical activity levels.

Do They Work?
Fitness trackers are great for those who really have no idea how many calories they burn during an activity and can help those in need of a motivational tool to keep them going. However, one study found that using a pedometer did not significantly increase step count among overweight and obese adults [1]. Another study with overweight people showed that after 18 months, those who had used a device that tracked steps and calorie expenditure lost on average five pounds less than people without self-tracking [2]. Thus, devices that monitor and provide feedback on physical activity may not offer an advantage over standard behavioral weight-loss approaches after all.

A FITNESS TRACKER INITIALLY INCREASES MOTIVATION

 

From personal observations and a (non-representative) survey among colleagues, it became apparent that a fitness tracker motivated us to be more active initially . For nearly all it was fun to log and track our own health data and progress with colorful charts and badges for achievements. However, the excitement – as with all new toys – had died away at some point and most of us were back to our previous activity levels after a while. Until now, not a single long-term study has analyzed the effect of constantly wearing a fitness tracker on the average consumer.

The Author's Personal Records

What Else Do They Do?
However, many users also observed that they developed a guilty conscience if they had not moved enough. In some cases this led to abandoning the device altogether. Thus, wearing the device alone is not enough to lead a healthier life. Many devices and apps offer an online platform where users can compare themselves with others or even challenge a friend. This additionally increases the motivation, but also the pressure to perform and reach your goals as the wearer is held accountable by the device, app and group members. The motivation to be at the top of a ranking can also be amplified by the ability to broadcast your exercise statistics via social media.

USING A FITNESS TRACKER CAN WORSEN EATING DISORDERS

This can, for obvious reasons, also have negative consequences for some people. One study examined the relationship between use of calorie counting and fitness tracking devices with eating disorder-related behaviour in college students [3]. Participants using calorie and fitness trackers manifested higher levels of eating concern and dietary restraint. Interestingly, fitness tracking, but not calorie counting, emerged as a unique indicator of eating disorder symptomatology. These findings suggest that for some individuals, these devices do more harm than good.

Should I Track?
It is nice to know your daily step count, heart rate, caloric intake, and the like, but wouldn’t you also have an approximate idea about these parameters if you simply reflected on your daily routine? Depending on how important it is for you to know the exact parameters, it makes sense to wear such a device... or not. Many devices have a built-in alarm that goes off if you have not move for a certain time. This might come in handy, but can also be annoying if you are at work and just can’t go for a walk right now. In the end, it always depends on the individual who wears the device.
If you are not prone to being overly critical about your weight, tracking your workouts and food intake can be motivating. But tracking everything might become obsessive for some, as the numerical focus of the trackers is akin to the obsessive fixation characteristic for eating disorders and exercise addiction.
It's true that these devices make you be more aware of your health. However, this can also be achieved without fitness trackers but instead with good education about lifestyle and health.

[1] Takahashi et al, Clin Interv Aging. 2016
[2] Jakicic et al, JAMA. 2016 
[3] Simpson et al, Eat Behav. 2017

by Claudia Willmes, PhD Alumni AG Eickholt/Schmitz

this article originally appeared June 2017 in CNS Volume 10, Issue 2, Digital Health and Big Data  

Are we all becoming "digitally demented"?

There is no denying it – we as a society have become reliant on technology in our daily lives. Can you imagine writing a paper without using Word’s spell checker? Or writing a text message without relying on autocorrect to avoid an awkward typo? But does overindulging in the technical conveniences of our digitalized lives mean that we are depriving ourselves of our skills?

Worries about losing our cognitive acuity thanks to technology are not completely new. Especially in South Korea, one of the most thoroughly digitalized countries in the world, physicians are concerned by what they call “digital dementia”. The concept behind this is known to all of us. Imagine our cognitive functions working like our muscles. If you don’t train them, they’ll slowly atrophy and lose strength. Take the author of this article as a warning example: According to many, map reading and spatial navigation have never figured among his strengths. The advent of satellite navigation and Google Maps, however, have made him lazy and, as a consequence, he is often seen wandering the corridors of his lab, completely disoriented.
It is easy to see why digital dementia advocates are especially worried about kids. Constant exposure to television, the internet and computer games, they claim, deprives them of “real-world experiences”. This supposedly harms their healthy development and turns them into socially disinterested loners. German weekly Der Spiegel quotes Manfred Spitzer, a psychiatrist and one of the most avid proponents of digital dementia, vowing that "(…) as shown here many times over, they [the digital media] truly do make us fat, dumb, aggressive, lonely, sick and unhappy." [1] But is this really anything more than fearmongering?

Image source: Zentrale Mediendienstleistungen, Charité (C.N.)

Dumb, aggressive, and lonely because of digital media?
Besides the obviously lurid term dementia, let’s get one thing straight first: Digital media cannot be bad per se - it depends on how you use them. If your online experience is restricted to cat videos or DIY makeup tutorials, it is easy to see why your cognitive abilities won’t benefit much. On the other hand, that is not what most people do. They use the internet to look up information, connect with friends and extend their knowledge.
Similarly, whether digital media have a positive or negative effect on kids depends on many factors, including content. Take TV shows: An easily relatable study found that watching “Dora the Explorer” was associated with better verbal skills, while Teletubbies was associated with worse verbal skills, among kids [2]. A similar case could be argued for video games, which have even been linked with improved cognitive skills [3], but depending on content, may also lead to less pro-social behavior and empathy and more aggression [4].

DORA THE EXPLORER OR TELETUBBIES?

What is more, research on this topic is methodologically tricky. This is because many variables of interest are correlated, a problem that often is not controlled for and may introduce bias. For example, it is easy to imagine that people who watch a lot of TV, on average, have lower academic achievement. Equally plausible, however, is that teens from disadvantaged backgrounds score lower grades – and watch more TV. Often, if you correct for these confounding associations statistically, the negative impact of digital media evaporates [5]. Also, many studies often assess screen time per se, lumping together exposure to any kind of electronic device. This implies that watching an hour of WWE Smackdown on TV is comparable to an hour playing online chess – and that can’t be right.

There is no good or bad – and definitely no "dementia"
So, is the story about digital dementia really grounded in facts or are these scare tactics propagated by technology-averse Luddites? Again, there is something to both sides of the coin. While undoubtedly over-relying on apps for every small juggle of mental arithmetic’s can’t be conducive to cognitive brilliance, there is no imaginable life without pocket calculators, GPS or spelling checking. More important, however, the way we use digital media determines whether they are beneficial for our grey matter or not.
There is no question that technological progress and digitalization have a huge impact on the way we grow up – also in terms of cognitive abilities. Likewise, it is obvious that something as complex and multi-sided as technology can’t be uniformly good or bad. Maybe, though, it is a good idea to give those kittens on YouTube a break and turn to something more “intellectual” – such as the many marvelous articles in this issue of the CNS Newsletter.

[1] http://bit.ly/2n3Ppbz
[2]Linebarger, Am Behav Sci, 2005
[3]Green and Seitz, Policy Insights from Behav Brain Sci, 2015
[4]Anderson et al, Psychol Bull, 2010
[5]Schmidt et al, Pediatrics, 2009


by Helge Hasselmann, PhD student AG Otte/Paul
this article originally appeared June 2017 in CNS Volume 10, Issue 2, Digital Health and Big Data