FitBit: Bringing The Prius Effect to Personal Fitness

In September 2008, TechCrunch held its second annual TechCrunch50 event.  The multi-day conference brings together early-stage startups to give demos of their products in front of a panel of tech investors and consultants.  As I browsed through TechCrunch’s coverage of the event, one demo caught my eye in particular: the FitBit.  I put the $99 device on my Christmas 2008 wish list, but production and shipment was delayed by almost a year and a half because of design issues.  I just received my unit last month.

FitBit was a rare TechCrunch 50 demo in that it actually conceived a product made out  bits and atoms.  The company produces an extremely compact device called the FitBit Tracker.  About the length of a match and the thickness of a pack of gum, the Tracker is little more than an accelerometer coupled with a Bluetooth antenna, a bit of memory, and an LED display.  In other words, it’s a tricked out, wi-fi enabled pedometer.

But the value of FitBit lies not so much in the gadget itself as as in the data mining it enables.  The driving concept is unofficially called “the Prius effect,” the idea that people will behave differently (better, hopefully) when they have more granular visibility into their behavior.  For the Prius, it’s the in-dash monitor that shows how much gas is being saved by the hybrid system.  For Google Powermeter, it’s the hour-by-hour online graph of home power consumption.  When you can track your pace and realize the stakes, the competition you hold with yourself to become better grows fiercer.

You clip the Tracker onto your belt or pocket, and it automatically logs your movement throughout the day.  When you come within range of the included USB base station, the Tracker offloads its data into the cloud-based FitBit Dashboard app.  That, in itself, is a lot of the value proposition: FitBit makes monitoring your fitness extremely easy.  No logging your daily steps in a spreadsheet, converting them into miles, or estimating the calories; FitBit does it all for you, automatically.  The onboard LED shows the raw data, as well as a little flower that grows and shrinks with your level of activity.

Using the web app, you can view your activity anywhere from minute-by-minute to day-by-day, including the approximate calories lost, miles traveled, etc.  If you need to enter activities not captured well by the Tracker (skiing and swimming for example) or if you forget to wear the gadget one day, Fitbit provides a deep database of activities that you can select from to approximate your exercise.

To help put your exercise into perspective, the Dashboard also enables you to track the food you eat and the amount of sleep you get.  For food tracking, it has a robust database of thousands of generic and commercial foods that you can easily search, select portions, and assign to different meals.  The Dashboard totals the calories and other nutritional value, and shows the data on the same graph as your fitness level.  Thus, in a single view, you can see (however approximately) whether you’re burning more than you’re consuming.

As for sleep tracking, I’ve found this to be the least useful feature of the FitBit suite (but it’s still a neat trick).  Essentially, you enable “sleep mode” on your tracker (rendering it ultra-sensitive to movement) and place it in a provided wristband before hitting the sack.  The Tracker then logs how long it takes you to fall asleep, how many times you wake up in the middle of the night, and (assuming you remember to turn off sleep mode when you get up in the morning) how long you’ve slept total.  This information is also uploaded to the Dashboard and graphed separately.

I’ve found it really great to get a general measure of my fitness and nutrition data, and it has helped me make better choices of how/what to eat and how much to exercise.  I have a feeling that I’ll start being lazy and slack off on inputting my food data, but the activity level data is really the most important part of the package.

What would make the experience even better?  A mobile app that lets me enter my food and review my data on the go, as well as provide custom alerts (like a mid-afternoon warning that my calorie intake is on track to exceed my calorie burn).  I think the app could be more social too, perhaps letting me assign friends, family, or coaches as dedicated accountability agents to review my data and encourage me to keep at it.

In sum, I think the FitBit is a really nifty, useful gadget that over the long run will totally be worth the money.  The nice thing is that the gadget itself needs no upgrading, and any inadequacies in the web product can be updated regularly through the cloud.  It’s one of the best pairings of bits and atoms I’ve seen in a while.