Stepping Up: The Fitbit One

It’s a weird technology – a device that doesn’t play music, check Facebook, or have a 4G connection. In fact, all it does is follow you around all day and record everything your body does (not your thumbs on your mobile). It’s the Fitbit One, a pedometer on steroids, tracking your steps, distance covered, stairs climbed, calories burned, and sleep, all on a device as big as a USB drive.

It clips onto your pocket during the day and goes onto a wristband at night, and its goal is to assemble a complete picture of your habits every day. It does give you daily targets to shoot for, and sends regular emails about your progress if you want, but its real strength is in the web dashboard that displays your results. It’s a testament to great data visualization, mapping spikes in activity and exactly how rubbish your sleep consistency is (I stay above 91% efficiency, but I can’t help but feel cheated out of 9% of my nap time).

While the marketing makes some modest claims about what the goals of the device are, the strange thing is, just having the Fitbit clipped to your pocket seems to encourage you to walk and move more. I felt annoyed if I forgot it at home because my walking wouldn’t be counted. I took stairs that I might not have otherwise, or skipped buses that I would have caught just to be lazy.

It’s tiny enough that it’s easy to lose, but the battery lasts for nearly a week, synchs to your laptop or newer-model smartphone (not all of them), and sits on your metaphorical shoulder dutifully tracking everything. It would be easy to call it a perfect example of nagging and guilt-tripping you into doing what you’re supposed to do anyway, but it’s hard to fault the device that just passively records everything, presents it beautifully, and lets you make up your own mind about getting off your ass.