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Health trackers are the current craze. After I bought a Fitbit, I wanted to determine what exactly could I do with Fitbit data. Can we actually learn something from this data that we did not know before? Most people don't need a watch to tell them that they walked a lot today or that they got a ton of sleep. As humans we have a pretty good gauge of our basic physical health. I am interested in figuring out how we can use data science to look at our health data over a longer period of time and learn something useful.
Lets look at a few things that people typically use Fitbit data for before we jump into the weeds.
- Setting Goals
- Motivation
- Tracking Progress
Ever since I bought a Fitbit, I found that I went to the gym a lot more frequently. Having something which keeps track of your progress is a great motivator. Not only is your daily steps recorded for your own viewing, you can share that data with your friends as a competition. Although I only have 1 friend on Fitbit, I found that was a good motivator to hit the ten thousand steps per day.
Goals which are not concrete nearly never get accomplished. Simply saying that "I will get in shape" is a terrible goal. In order for you to actually accomplish your goals, they need to be quantifiable and measurable. Rather than saying "I will improve my health this year", you can say "I will loose ten pounds this year by increasing my daily step count to fifteen thousand and going to the gym twice a week". One goal is wishy washy where the other is concrete and measurable. Having concrete data from Fitbit allows you to quantify your goals and set milestones for you to accomplish. Along the way to achieving your goal, you can easily track your progress.
Simply knowing your Fitbit data can help you make some better educated decisions about your fitness. By comparing your data against what is healthy you can tweak your lifestyle. For example: if you notice that you are only getting 6 hours of sleep per night, you can look up the recommended amount of sleep and tweak your sleep routine until you hit that target.
Alright, lets do some data science!