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Ask HN: Good Fitness Band?

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Re: Ask HN: Good Fitness Band?

#11

Post by runjake »

You mentioned body temperature twice, so I’m going to pick on that one. If it’s a wrist-based device, it’s going to measure your wrist temperature, which normally differs from your body temperature a great deal. The Oura ring works roughly the same with your finger.

What exactly are you looking for WRT your body temperature? Because for most fitness wearables, you just going to be able to log deltas. Kind of a solution looking for a problem at this point.

Overall, you should have well-defined goals before you purchase because a device that can log a bunch of body telemetry gets boring pretty quickly without solid goals.

Re: Ask HN: Good Fitness Band?

#12

Post by gardenfelder »

inetsee wrote: post #9

I used to have a FitBit that I wasn't entirely happy with. After some health issues, I recently upgraded to a FitBit Charge 5 that I'm mostly satisfied with. It was quite inexpensive; I got mine for $99. It does continuous heart rate monitoring, but I have doubts about the accuracy of its resting heart rate calculation. It has all of the "interesting sensors" you listed, but I haven't explored them all. The one featu…

Rem sleep is typically measured in a sleep lab with many sensors, including EEG sensors - which do not exist on the wrist devices; inferring Rem is thus difficult. To me, it's just a kind of "relative" reading: think "rest state", and I care about it changing from time to time.

I upgraded to a Charge 5 from Charge 4, even though I happen to own an iWatch as well. Big mistake.

Charge 5 is happy to beep sms (morse code) from time to time when my cell phone picks up text messages. In the day time, that's fine, buf 4am in the fucking morning? There's no damned way to turn it off.

I am not aware of a skin temperature reading on it, though it does do an EKG-like reading, just like the iWatch. No clue whether it will phone 911 if my ticker gets funky; iWatch is known to do that.

I think I'd rather go back to a Charge 4, if only to get rid of text messages. I really don't need them - especially in the middle of the night.

Re: Ask HN: Good Fitness Band?

#13

Post by mustachionut »

runjake wrote: post #11

You mentioned body temperature twice, so I’m going to pick on that one. If it’s a wrist-based device, it’s going to measure your wrist temperature, which normally differs from your body temperature a great deal. The Oura ring works roughly the same with your finger. What exactly are you looking for WRT your body temperature? Because for most fitness wearables, you just going to be able to log deltas. Kind of a soluti…

Makes sense. Could a fever still be detected with the wrist temperature? I was reading the wikipedia page on fever, and it has this interesting graphic showing different fever patterns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever#/media/File:Fever_Patter...

...so I was wondering if this could lead to rough diagnostic method using a temperature sensing fitness wearable.

Re: Ask HN: Good Fitness Band?

#14

Post by maxerickson »

It's not slim or a fitness band, but I like my Garmin smart watch (the discontinued Forerunner 645 Music). It also doesn't have great data access.

It's comfortable, has good enough battery life, is easy to use, and so on.

Re: Ask HN: Good Fitness Band?

#15

Post by inetsee »

deepsun wrote: post #10
inetsee wrote: post #9

I used to have a FitBit that I wasn't entirely happy with. After some health issues, I recently upgraded to a FitBit Charge 5 that I'm mostly satisfied with. It was quite inexpensive; I got mine for $99. It does continuous heart rate monitoring, but I have doubts about the accuracy of its resting heart rate calculation. It has all of the "interesting sensors" you listed, but I haven't explored them all. The one featu…

Wow, interrupted sleep every day is not good. Maybe auto-feeder once a day would help?

My cat is quite insistent. You really don't want to cross her!

Re: Ask HN: Good Fitness Band?

#18

Post by quickthrower2 »

schwartzworld wrote: post #17
quickthrower2 wrote: post #16

Trying to return my Fitbit Versa 3. It drifts about 5 minutes per day :-(

Is it connected to wifi? I would assume that for many of these devices it's cheaper to sync the clock over the internet than to include a realtime clock

Thanks. I am trying the wifi connection to see if this helps.
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