The Nike+ FuelBand has been around for a while and established itself as the first king of fitness tracking devices. Its now familiar design is a simple bracelet worn on the wrist. Using sensors reading pulse, body temperature and other factors, the FuelBand tracks the wearer’s physical activity, steps taken, calories burned and “Fuel” consumed over the course of a day.
FuelBand interacts with the Nike+ software suite to track goals, progress and other fitness data. We tried one out here over the last few months and found it reliable and effective. The software package is carefree to use, and its data useful. The FuelBand even holds up well through months of use.
There were some drawbacks for me personally. First of all, I have a proper man’s wrist. I hunt. I ride. I don’t do cosplay, and I don’t worry about my carbon footprint. So, the bones in my wrist are too thick for the FuelBand – even with an extender. Therefore, it would dig into my skin off and on throughout the day.
Its other drawback is not the FuelBand’s fault, really. The reality of its data often provides a cold slap to the face. By tracking “Fuel” and calories burned, the Band essentially tells it like it is during your workouts. There’s no more thinking like, “I was on the Elliptical for 30 minutes. I must’ve burned 1,000 calories today.” The FuelBand is right there to tell you otherwise. Too often, the actual activity account pulls you back down to Earth and back into the gym.
Those quibbles aside, the Nike+ FuelBand is still the best, comprehensive option for fitness monitoring at $150.
But there are other less expensive options — devices or software services that don’t do everything the FuelBand accomplishes, but come close enough.
The Endomondo free fitness tracking app log physical effort. It can be used for distance-based activities and utilizes GPS to track routes, distance, duration, split times and calorie consumption. Endomondo lets users record workouts with a built-in pedometer so data can be uploaded and logged when an Internet connection becomes available.
The creators of Tinke took another path, focusing on overall quality of life in place of monitoring fitness. Created by Zensorium, Tinke ($120) uses optical sensing technologies “to capture blood volume changes and quantifies your fitness and relaxation levels into indexes for easy comparison.”
Meanwhile, the device’s Zensorium software also tracks stress and encourages calmness in the user. In fact, Tinke is best used when the user is at rest as it tracks overall physical condition and health outside of exertion periods.
According to its creators, TInke’s indexes serve as “a form of knowledge and encouragement for you to maintain or improve on. Being fit and well starts from within and monitoring your weight alone is not a good indicator.”
Using a TInke is blinkingly easy as it only requires your thumb over the data readers for about a minute. Only time will tell how accurate it is for various users, but Tinke’s creators deserve credit for looking at fitness gadgets a different way.
