My Name is Trick

The mile we know oh so well is sup­pos­edly equiv­a­lent to the dis­tance cov­ered in 1,000 paces by sol­diers in armor for hour after hour, day after day, week after week. Well, that is what I was told in school. The sol­diers would drive wooden steaks into the ground every 1,000 paces to track the dis­tance cov­ered. Despite the com­par­a­tive sim­i­lar­ity of the words, the ety­mol­ogy of the word ‘mile’ comes from the Latin for the num­ber one-thousand. Thus the lin­guis­tic con­nec­tion between a unit of mea­sure today and the Roman foot sol­dier two thou­sand years ago.

Well, sort of.

In truth the Roman mile was roughly 400 feet shorter than the 5,280 feet we know today. Well, usu­ally. You have to con­sider the dif­fer­ing length of steps depend­ing on how rushed the sol­diers were, or how tired they were. But let’s assume the dis­tance around 4800 feet is the solid aver­age dis­tance for the Roman mile.

So where did those extra 400 feet end up com­ing from? Burueacracy. 1,760 yards, or 5,280 feet, was defined as the length of a mile since 1593 when the British Par­lia­ment passed an act that offi­cially defined the dis­tance as “eight fur­longs, every fur­long forty poles, and every pole six­teen foot and a half.” Not exactly a sim­ple thing, but from this dec­la­ra­tion came the offi­cial mea­sure that we know today. This became known as the statute mile (not to be con­fused with the nau­ti­cal mile which is itself another unique length not directly rel­e­vant to this discussion.)

That act of par­lia­ment wasn’t the final word on the mat­ter though. The actual dis­tance of a mile var­ied from coun­try to coun­try or even per­son to per­son. So, in July of 1959, a hand­ful of nations met and agreed upon the exact length of the inter­na­tional yard in terms of meters, and thus the inter­na­tional mile was also cod­i­fied as 1,760 yards.

Now that we’ve reached the final dis­tance of a mod­ern mile, lets jump back to the renais­sance for a bit and exam­ine the ori­gin of the meter. (I swear I talk about the Fit­bit soon.)

In 1668, sev­enty five years after the dis­tance of a mile was defined by par­lia­ment, an Eng­lish cleric and philoso­pher named John Wilkins pro­posed a unit of dis­tance that he named the ‘metre’ which was defined by the dis­tance cov­ered by a pen­du­lum with a half-period of one second.

It’s a bril­liant way to deter­mine dis­tance. He avoided the rab­bit hole of depen­dency in deter­min­ing length by using the con­stants of grav­ity and time, all by using a very sim­ply machine: the pendulum.

I remem­ber being fas­ci­nated by pen­du­lums as a kid. The Orlando Sci­ence Cen­ter had a giant Fou­calt pen­du­lum that I would always run up to to and press my face against the glass as I watched its slow swings back and forth.

I can remem­ber draw­ing a sim­i­lar­ity between that pen­du­lum and the way our legs moved. Sure, our legs have extra joints and mus­cles which enable fur­ther motion, but I remem­ber many times stand­ing there watch­ing that pen­du­lum while also swing­ing one of my legs back and forth freely as if it was a pen­du­lum of its own. With­out any good rea­son I was fas­ci­nated by the idea that our legs were pen­du­lums mak­ing use of grav­ity for at least part of the work.

So there I’d stand and watch the pen­du­lum swing, con­vinced that if I stood there long enough it would even­tu­ally slow down and stop. Even­tu­ally the par­ents would tear me away, ready to move onto the next exhibit. And like any good math nerd I’d then count the num­ber of steps it would take me to get to them, or the num­ber of words in a sen­tence I heard some­one say­ing, or the num­ber of squares in the tile. Etc.

Count­ing is so fun as a kid. But I can’t imag­ine it was fun for the Roman sol­diers tasked with track­ing the dis­tance they cov­ered. I’m sure they all dreamed of some auto­mated way to track the num­ber of paces taken. Unfor­tu­nately the Ital­ian penin­sula had to wait over a thou­sand years for the idea of a pedome­ter to arrive. Leonardo Da Vinci imag­ined a sim­ple mechan­i­cal pedome­ter in the 1400s and wrote about it in his design jour­nals. It wasn’t until the 1700s when the first mechan­i­cal pedome­ter actu­ally came into being.

The first mechan­i­cal pedome­ter was invented by Abraham-Louis Per­relet. It made use of a pendulum-like sys­tem that incre­mented the counter with each sway of its count­ing mech­a­nism. Far from per­fect, but it remained largely unchanged until the the 1960s.

In 1965 the ‘manpo-kei’ was intro­duced to Japan along with the notion that 10,000 steps a day was the secret to a healthy life. This is cred­ited as the first dig­i­tal pedome­ter in the world, quickly mak­ing its way from Japan to the rest of the world. The tech­nol­ogy improved incre­men­tally but in the end a dig­i­tal pedome­ter was still a fun gad­get that never really caught on. Sure most peo­ple tried it, but usu­ally as part of some ill-fated weight­loss scheme. Among its faults was the that it was a soli­tary device, and thus you relied on your­self to track and use as a moti­va­tional tool.

Forty years later Fit­bit Inc. launched the “Fit­bit Clas­sic.” In tech­ni­cal terms it isn’t a pedome­ter like those above, it’s most cer­tainly not mechan­i­cal, it is an accelerom­e­ter sys­tem which ana­lyzes the data to gen­er­ate step counts, as well as ana­lyze the inten­sity of the activity.

Fit­bits do more than just count steps. They are wear­able at night as a way to mon­i­tor your sleep­ing habits and they track some other points of activ­ity as well. Through the iPhone & Android app you can also track calo­ries eaten, water drank, as well as your weight and body fat percentage.

In all, it allows you to track sev­eral points of your ‘quan­ti­fied self.’

In 2008, Kevin Kelly (ex-Wired edi­tor) and Gary Wolf (con­tribut­ing writer for Wired), held the first Quan­ti­fied Self meetup in San Fran­cisco. QS is a move­ment for “self-knowledge through num­bers.” With the Fit­bit, as well as a few other entrants in the field of self-tracking gad­gets, they saw the oppor­tu­nity for an orga­nized group ded­i­cated to using the tech­nol­ogy, shar­ing the knowl­edge they gain, and see­ing just what can be done. Since then thou­sands of peo­ple have gath­ered in var­i­ous city-based mee­tups, as well as at larger con­ven­tions around the world. Some make use of gad­gets like the Fit­bit, oth­ers code their own dig­i­tal tools while oth­ers do it with sim­ple old fash­ioned way with a spread­sheet and a graph.

I’ve never got­ten to attend one of these gath­er­ings but I fol­low Quan­ti­fied Self’s web­site and, as exhib­ited by the care­ful track­ing of my weight loss and body fat, I do have an inter­est in the realm of QS.

Up to now I tracked my weight loss through a scale and a spread­sheet. I tried a hand­ful of other things, mobile apps, etc. but I found that I pre­ferred just hav­ing a raw Google Doc to work with. I also tried track­ing more, things like hours slept, calo­ries eaten, etc. But in the end I always found the extra track­ing cumbersome.

In the mind of want­ing to track more and under­stand my body bet­ter, I’ve been eye­ing QS related gad­gets for a while. Largely though the focus cen­tered on the Fit­bit, the Nike Fuel­band, and the Jaw­bone Up. Fit­bit is a com­pany founded to make their flag­ship gad­get. Nike’s Fuel­band is an obvi­ous accom­pa­ni­ment to their grow­ing ath­letic brand offer­ings. Jaw­bone is per­haps a sur­prise given that the com­pany is most famous for their blue­tooth ear­piece, but I duti­fully researched each before mak­ing my purchase.

There were three things which really sold me on the Fitbit:

1) I didn’t want a bracelet. — Bracelet track­ers appear to be slightly less accu­rate than those worn on the belt or pocket clip, though they do have two ben­e­fits over the belt clips which I’ll get to later. Note, I don’t have any con­clu­sive evi­dence that bracelets are less accurate.

2) Access to data — I really want the abil­ity to do data exports. Of the three com­pa­nies, Fit­bit is the only one to have any such func­tion­al­ity though they include it only as part of their pre­mium sub­scrip­tion benefits.

3) Cus­tomer ser­vice — The cus­tomer ser­vice sto­ries about Fit­bit are all pos­i­tive from what I could find.

Now that I’ve owned my Fit­bit for almost two weeks I feel ready to draw some con­clu­sions and make some com­ments about the gad­get as a whole.

I find wear­ing a Fit­bit fun. That prob­a­bly says a lot about me and where my mind­set it. I really enjoy being able to look down and see how many steps I’ve taken today. Fun is good. Fun means there is a pos­i­tive feed­back intro­duced for sim­ple activ­i­ties which it tracks and makes it much more likely I’ll con­tinue to work on being active.

On the oppo­site end of the scale, the Fit­bit causes me dis­tress when I know I’m bypass­ing things which would up its count such as tak­ing an ele­va­tor rather than climb­ing the stairs at work. It’s not major dis­tress, but I find myself feel­ing guilty. Which is also a good thing. Sure, some­times I have a good rea­son to skip the stairs such as con­tin­u­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one who takes the ele­va­tor — but all things being equal it is the push I need to make me take the stairs when trav­el­ing between floors at work.

There is also one very clear truth that the Fit­bit makes blind­ingly clear: Between the office chairs at work and the couch at home, I live a seden­tary life. I spend a lot of time sit­ting around and that fur­ther empha­sizes the need for me to carve out time for exercise.

As for crit­i­cisms, there are per­haps a few things I’m not thrilled with.

You have to be care­ful with this thing. I had a scare nearly los­ing my Fit­bit after hav­ing it for less than a week. Ini­tially I wore my fit­bit with it hooked onto my jean’s change pocket putting the Fit­bit on the out­side. This seemed rea­son­ably secure and allowed easy access to the view screen.

Bad plan.

It got caught in my seat­belt when I was in the car and was pulled free of the belt clip with­out my notic­ing. Thank­fully it fell out in the car and not in a park­ing lot so I was able to find it. But this event taught me an impor­tant les­son: keep the Fit­bit tucked inside your pocket, not out­side it.

Beyond the risk of it falling off your belt there also lies the risk that it remains in you pocket all the way to the wash. This thing is small. The size of a USB drive. I know of one friend who washed his Fit­bit only a few weeks after get­ting it. If the Fit­bit is in the mid­dle of a pile of laun­dry there is no way you will notice it.

While the bat­tery life seems quite good, one of my com­plaints is around the pro­pri­etary charg­ing cable. They use a pro­pri­etary cable for charg­ing and I really wish they had just used Micro-USB so that I could use my own cables and not have to keep track of this pro­pri­etary dongle.

Lastly, and per­haps most damn­ing: I’m not actu­ally con­vinced that it is… well, use­ful. Yet.

The Fit­bit can be a pas­sive tool. If used solely for per­sonal track­ing, it is not too dif­fer­ent from the pedome­ter we already dis­cussed. And in that case, it has the same down­fall as pedome­ters. But Fit­bit and the other com­pa­nies have begun work­ing beyond this by adding a social layer and intro­duc­ing achieve­ments based on your lev­els of activ­ity. In an attempt to be more than a pas­sive tool Fit­bit has also set it up such that when you’re within strik­ing dis­tance of a goal your smart­phone and email can pop up a note urg­ing you to push a bit fur­ther to hit your goal. But these are not aggres­sive pushes.

There is one fea­ture for the Fuel­band that I hadn’t con­sid­ered before buy­ing my Fit­bit. More of my friends have a Fuel­band than have a Fitbit.

Fit­bit, Nike, and, I assume, Jaw­bone, all have built in social capa­bil­i­ties where you can add friends to com­pare and com­pete with your lev­els of activ­ity. Tak­ing this fea­ture, where your own lit­tle dae­mon reports reg­u­larly on your progress, the social activ­ity should not be over­looked as sim­ply a tacked on part of these tools. This is what I did before I had one of these. I believe the social aspect is actu­ally the most crit­i­cal thing for these gadgets.

While the Fit­bit appears to be the bet­ter tech­ni­cal gad­get, it is in truth lag­ging behind Nike’s Fuel­band for this very fact. Where as I have one coworker who owns a Fit­bit, I know of a half dozen who have Nike Fuel­bands and, had I cho­sen to go that way, I’d be in a big­ger pack for fitness.

They say that sur­round­ing your­self with fit peo­ple will help you with your fit­ness goals. I think, as we grow to be more and more enmeshed in our dig­i­tal lives that this sort of dig­i­tal flock­ing could have the same effect. See­ing my friend Paul cross the 12,000 step mark for a day, or that Brian might have dou­bled me up in terms of activ­ity, can def­i­nitely be motivators.

I think it says some­thing that after I had a few peo­ple read the early drafts of this arti­cle they weren’t sure how I actu­ally felt about the Fitbit.

I like it but I don’t love it. I enjoy hav­ing it and see­ing the counter increase, but I do not regard this as a must have gad­get — yet. I do think, for those who live mostly seden­tary lives, it has def­i­nite value as an addi­tional moti­va­tional tool and quan­tifi­able sur­vey of just how active you are. For those who are already mostly fit and sim­ply look to tread water, I don’t think this qual­i­fies as a tool that will really ben­e­fit you.

Photo cred­its:

• Fit­bit images — http://www.Fitbit.com
• Roman sol­diers — http://www.flickr.com/photos/bispham2/2500746771/
• John Wilkins por­trait — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkins
• Pen­du­lum — http://www.flickr.com/photos/sylvar/70589378/
• Activ­ity graph — My fitbit.com profile
• Quan­ti­fied Self logo — http://www.quantifiedself.com
• Stairs to Ele­va­tor — http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/5061697780/
• Laun­dro­mat — http://www.flickr.com/photos/muehlinghaus/322210764/
• Wolves — http://www.flickr.com/photos/ucumari/2329250410/