The six fitness monitors tested for WTHR include highly recognized brands and/or easy-to-find models you’ll find at popular retailers and online (if you don’t own them already). But the big names didn’t necessarily perform better than their lower-profile rivals, and paying big bucks didn’t guarantee more accuracy than some of the cheaper options.
As a group, they all tracked steps pretty darn well — unless you spend the majority of your free time sweeping floors.
Distance tracking was, overall, not bad. But if you want to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, and by a mile you mean approximately 5,280 feet, you’ll likely need something more precise than these fitness trackers.
Heart rate was not good enough. Realistically, you probably won’t face sudden cardiac arrest triggered by a fitness tracker error. But a 20+ heart beat per minute oops on something so important just isn’t cool.
And calories? What else can we possibly say about calories? If the image of 5 mysterious pounds of monthly belly fat and 33 Big Macs doesn’t stick with you, there’s not much more I can say to illustrate the travesty of the calorie error rate for all of the fitness trackers we tested.
