Smartwatches and Your Health
From Fitbits to Apple watches, smartwatches are available in all shapes, sizes, colors and price ranges. This hands-free experience is meant to blend into your lifestyle in as simple a way as possible. The unassuming act of wearing this technology can greatly affect your life in a positive way. Keeping track of your day-to-day behaviour has never been easier. Most smartwatch users don’t even remember they are wearing their monitor throughout most of the day. Therefore, the watch can help users obtain critical information about their lifestyle in order to make better choices and changes – without becoming obsessed. Smartwatches provide many benefits but here are a few we’d like to name:
Measures Resting Heart Rate
One of the greatest advantages of wearing a smartwatch is being able to keep track of your resting heart rate. How your ticker behaves throughout the day can tell you a lot about your health. Your smartwatch will need to have a built-in heart monitor feature to measure your RHR. While the monitor will up the price of your watch – it is well worth it.
The average adult should aim to have a resting heart rate of between 80 to 100 beats per minute. If you are an avid sport enthusiast your RHR could be as low as 60 beats per minute. A lack of physical exercise will cause your RHR to be higher forcing your heart to work harder than necessary.
Your sport watch will use your RHR statistics and contrast them to your maximum heart rate in order to determine your recommended fitness training heart rate zones thus making your workouts more effective. Measuring your RHR will also give you a more accurate daily calorie burn count.
Measures Nutrition
Although smartwatch technology has not been developed to the point of it being able to automatically recognize the food we are ingesting – the immediate solution provided by smartwatch mobile apps is very impactful. In order to calculate calorie burning rates effectively, one must also take careful note of their calorie intake manually.
App developers have gone as far as to help users log their food by providing easy bar code readers, calorie information by brand, and geographic location. In addition, brands like Fitbit’s apps detect individual log history to help pick-up on user patterns and make their food entry easier.
Depending on your nutritional goals, identifying a daily calorie deficit goal and adding this information to your smartwatch profile will help create effective alerts, warnings and ultimately help you stay on-track.
Measures Exercise
Most people assume that a smartwatch merely measures the amount of steps you take during the day. However, the best smartwatches will also measure your physical activity depending on the type of exercise you are carrying out. It is not the same to run for 30 minutes than to lift weights or do the elliptical for half-an-hour. Keep a more accurate track of how many calories you burn, your exercise intensity and your progress throughout the year.
Measures Sleep
Don’t ever underestimate the power of sleep. Although lifestyle may not always permit, most doctors recommend that adults sleep a minimum of 7 to 9 hours a night. A smart watch has the capability of automatically keeping track of when you are sleeping simply by monitoring your movements. This information will be stored in your smartwatch app via Bluetooth and help you understand more about your weekly sleep patterns in order to make conscious health choices that could improve your lifestyle.
Taking control of the amount of hours you snooze will improve your mood, help you remember more, increase your life expectancy, lower stress, control your weight and even spur creativity.
Measures Water Intake
Some of the newest smartwatches can even track the amount of water you intake in a given day. Medical professionals recommend 1.6L of fluid per day for women (about 8 200ml glasses) and 2L of fluid per day for men (about 10 200ml glasses). This may seem like a simple task but most adults aren’t getting enough water! If you are deciding between smartwatches, we highly recommend that you ensure that the brand’s app has a water log feature. With a couple clicks you can keep track of how much water you’re drinking and ensure that you are reaping the benefits of that H2O!
Keeping track of your water intake with your smartwatch will help increase energy, relieve fatigue, eliminate toxins, improve skin complexion and could even decrease your headaches.
Smartwatches are the way of the future and the future is looking like a healthy one!
Sources: https://smartwatches.org/learn/benefits-of-using-a-smartwatch/ https://gizmodo.com/how-smart-watches-might-actually-improve-your-health-1795130739
https://www.bestdoctorsblog.com/the-benefits-of-a-smart-watch/
