Anyone who uses smart technology or is considering doing so knows that devices have been able to track simple stats like steps walked, distance ran, and altitude gained for a while. But the latest generation of devices on your wrist, in your bedroom, and even in your office evaluate fitness, recovery, and wellbeing in interesting and innovative ways. Let's look at some of the most promising metrics and how their insights can help you live more healthfully.
1) Monitoring Your Workday Movement
Purchasing an adjustable desk is a significant first step in getting you away from sitting all day, which can dim your powers of creativity and imagination, increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes, and cause or worsen back, hip, and knee complaints. Then you can get a multi-surface mat that encourages beneficial micromovement throughout the day. But while it’s great to have the intention of standing and moving more, it sometimes doesn’t happen.
Whether it’s finding an elusive flow state, getting stuck in long conference calls, or becoming trapped by the endless back and forth of emails and Slack messages, your best laid plans for changing positions can easily get derailed. As a result, you might well get to 5 PM and realize that you didn’t switch things up at all and, in fact, remained seated for hours at a time.
Fortunately, there’s a new kind of device that can help. Tempo from Ergodriven is a smart handset that attaches unassumingly to the side of your adjustable desk. Rather than hoping you remember to move your desktop up and down regularly throughout the day, Tempo removes the guesswork and does it for you. It lets you configure in advance when you want to sit and stand, which you can easily change as your schedule shifts. Tempo also actively monitors your position and can automatically adjust your desk if you’ve been sitting for too long.
This convenient adjustable desk add-on allows you to track how often you change from sitting to standing during any given day and also to see how long you spent in each position. When combined with your insights from your other devices – like workout stats and seeing how much you moved when not exercising – Tempo provides a more complete view of your total daily activity level, which you can tweak to improve both your health and productivity.
2) Hitting Your Strain Sweet Spot
To create adaptations of any kind, you need to expose your body to a stressor and then recover from it. This is true of an athlete wanting to get bigger, faster, and stronger, a musician seeking to master a concerto, or a hobbyist learning how to start woodworking in their garage. If you don’t subject yourself to enough of a stimulus, you won’t prompt the positive changes you seek, whereas if you always push yourself too far, you’ll overload your system and will likely do more harm than good.
Until recently, wearables were all about measuring simple single metrics and then progressed to evaluating individual training sessions. The latest devices have started showing users more about the overall stress that’s being placed on their body and nervous system. This way, they can monitor their current training load, see if it’s too much, not enough, or just right, and make adjustments going forward.
For example, the WHOOP band started displaying a strain score. This calculates the cardiovascular load based on how high your heart rate gets during a workout and for how long it stays elevated. When logging reps, sets, and weight with the Strength Trainer function, this calculates muscular load to show how much strain is being placed on the musculoskeletal system. Using metrics from research studies, the algorithm also takes into account the cardiovascular and muscular load for various other sports and activities, combining intensity and density.
In addition, the WHOOP algorithm incorporates strain from non-workout lifestyle factors. For example, if your heart rate went and stayed up during your morning or afternoon commute, you got stressed out before a big meeting, or you were upset when your toddler took a tumble, the band would log the event and adjust the strain score accordingly. On a scale of 0 to 21, the average user’s strain score is 11. It accounts for individualized HR numbers and fitness level and can be viewed alongside your recovery score to see if you’re doing too much, not enough, or hitting a sweet spot.
3) Tailoring Your Sleep Comfort
Sleep experts agree that most people nod off faster, stay asleep longer, and wake up less often when their thermostat is set between 65 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. But in most homes, there are hot and cold spots throughout the house, and unless you have a really advanced HVAC system, the thermostat is only basing the big number you move up or down on a small data set. Then you add in seasonal variations and your bedroom could end up being quite a bit cooler or warmer than the rest of the house.
This isn’t the only thing that can impact your core temperature and have a knock-on effect on your slumber. The timing, duration, and intensity of an evening shower, bath, or hot tub soak, what you wear to bed, and life stages like adolescence, pregnancy, or menopause can all factor in. And if you’ve got a significant other next to you, you might end up pulling bedding onto you or pushing it off depending on who runs hotter or colder.
A smart mattress or cover from the likes of Eight Sleep can help ensure you stay at the perfect temperature for restful slumber all night long. You simply select your preferred setting from 55 to 110 degrees and your sleep and wake time. The company’s intelligent Pod Cover then does the rest, using an autopilot system that takes into account your age, gender, and local weather. It also monitors the surface temperature of your side of the bed and heats or cools it dynamically according to your preference. And as there are two individualized zones, everyone should wake up feeling well rested.
The Eight Sleep Pod Cover also sends a report to your phone via an app every morning. It shows your heart rate, the amount of time you spent in each sleep stage, and heart rate variability (HRV) for the night before. You’ll also get percentage scores for time slept, routine (which includes bedtime and wake-up consistency and how long it took to fall asleep), and sleep quality.
You can see how this compares to your typical slumber across a week or month and easily spot any irregularities or improvements. It can be useful to compare these numbers to the sleep scores on a wearable to see if the numbers line up. If you notice a negative trend, you can dial in on your sleep hygiene to try and improve sleep quality and quantity.