Commentary: Americans are sedentary, and physical activity levels are abysmal. Its no secret that being active is associated with profound benefits. We hear it from our doctors, media, and even at work in the form of health promotion programs. Unfortunately, just knowing we need to be more active has been ineffective. The advent of affordable wearable devices has the potential to help individuals increase and sustain activity levels to take advantage of the benefits.
Understanding your activity levels is the first step in improving your health as you cant manage what you dont measure. However its only been in the last three to five years that individuals have had access to real tools that can measure their activity in an accurate manner. Before, we had to rely on recall asking people questions such as In the past month, on average, how many minutes per week are you active? The approach is fraught with problems, but outside of the research setting (where scientists could fit people with expensive and accurate devices) it was the only tool we had.
