How to Improve Your Fitness with Biometric Wearables
The use of biometric wearables and wearable technology like smartwatches and fitness trackers has grown rapidly in recent years with users reaching an estimated 1.1 billion in 2022 alone.
These wearable devices allow users to easily track biometric data related to health and fitness, such as heart rate, sleep quality, activity levels, skin temperature, and blood oxygen levels.
The rise of more wearable devices and electronic biometric technology is making it easier than ever for people to monitor their physical health and well-being. By syncing with smartphone apps, these wearable fitness trackers provide insights into your biometric data that can help improve fitness levels.
In this article, I’ll take a closer look at exactly how biometric wearable technology can improve your fitness levels.
What Is A Biometric Wearable?
A biometric wearable is an electronic device that can be worn on the body to track various forms of biometric data, such as heart rate, sleep patterns, steps taken, calories burned, blood pressure, and more.
These wearable devices include fitness trackers from brands like Fitbit and Garmin, smartwatches such as Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch, and even smart clothing or accessories that have built-in biometric sensors.
Biometric wearables use a variety of sensors and technologies to collect health and fitness data. Common sensors you might find in biometric wearables are:
PPG Sensors: Photoplethysmography sensors measure heart rate by using light to detect changes in light absorption that happen as blood flows under the skin. PPG sensors often use a simple LED to emit light.
Accelerometers: Accelerometers can detect movement and acceleration forces in 3D space allowing devices to track the steps and other movements of the user.
Bioimpedance Sensors: These are electronic devices used to estimate body composition. Small currents are sent through the body to measure resistance and estimate body fat percentage.
Thermistors: Skin temperature can be monitored by using thermistors that contact the surface of the user’s skin.
Pulse Oximetry Sensors: These sensors use LEDs to measure blood oxygen levels which is useful for indicating progress or when something might be off with your baseline.
Using a combination of these sensors wearables can also indicate sleep length and quality, respiratory rates, stress levels, energy expenditure, irregular heart rates, and more.
The variety of sensors integrated into biometric wearables allows them to gather precise physiological and activity data that can provide insights into a person’s health and fitness. The sensors give wearable devices “biometric” capabilities to turn bodily signals into useful health data.
Biometric wearables sync with apps to provide insights into physical activity, sleep quality, heart health, stress levels, and other metrics. This data can be useful for improving health and fitness, tracking progress over time, and managing medical conditions.
How Do Biometric Wearables Help Improve Fitness?
Biometric wearables help improve fitness by enabling precise tracking of health metrics and personal performance. They optimize workouts, monitor sleep and recovery, promote accountability, and motivate through real-time data-driven insights.
Wearables that features biometric sensors can help enhance physical activity in the following ways:
Progress Tracking: Wearable devices allow precise tracking of progress over time to see improvements in fitness levels. Things that would normally get overlooked can be monitored and used to your advantage to improve the rate of progress.
Better Sleep: Biometric wearables can track sleep stages, restlessness, and sleep quality to help users improve their sleep habits and get optimal rest.
Better Recovery: Wearable technology allows monitoring of heart rate variability, breathing rate, and resting time to optimize recovery between workouts and avoid overtraining.
Better Body Insights: Wearables provide baseline vitals and can detect early signs of illness, enabling users to get ahead of health issues and learn their body’s normal rhythms.
Accountability: Fitness trackers promote accountability and motivation to exercise consistently.
Easy Access to Data: With wearables integrated into daily life, fitness stats are always readily available.
Motivation: When you can see real positive changes in your body’s functionality and performance from a wearable device, it can give a massive boost to motivation.
Optimized workouts: Wearable technology allows for optimized workouts by monitoring heart rate zones and providing feedback.
Goal setting: Wearable fitness trackers enable users to monitor biometric data like steps taken, calories burned, heart rate, sleep quality, and exercise intensity. Having access to detailed health metrics through wearable technology and apps allows people to set personalized fitness goals.
Adaptable plans: The biometrics give insights to understand your body’s performance and adapt fitness plans accordingly.
Biometrics empower wearers with insights to understand their body’s performance and adapt their fitness plans accordingly.
By leveraging biometric wearable technology, users can have world-class performance monitoring accessible right from their smartphones.
How Can Artificial Intelligence Enhance Biometric Wearables?
The integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into wearable technology and other electronic devices will provide even more useful insights to users on their health and fitness levels.
AI allows wearable devices to provide more predictive and actionable insights from sensor data.
Through machine learning algorithms applied to heart rate, activity levels, sleep patterns, and other biometrics gathered by wearables, AI can detect subtle changes that impact health earlier. This enables users to get ahead of potential illnesses and take preventative measures.
AI can also help filter the massive amounts of biometric data gathered by the sensors down to the most useful to give personalized recommendations for the wearer.
As more powerful AI is integrated into wearable biometrics, the devices will become digital personalized coaches that provide tailored guidance for each user’s health and fitness journey based on their biometric data.
Wrapping Up
Biometric wearables have come a long way in recent years and the future looks promising as technology advances and further integration with AI technology occurs.
With next-generation sensors and AI-powered analytics, these devices will provide increasingly detailed insights into an individual’s health and fitness.
You can expect their wearables to offer even more personalized data tracking, predictive health alerts, and tailored recommendations.
While wearable tech still has room for improvement, the benefits for users who want granular biometrics to optimize their bodies and lives are immense.
As medical understanding increases and tech capabilities grow, biometric wearables will become integral tools in preventative healthcare and personalized fitness optimization.
