>> FITBIT CHARGEHR - ONE WEEK AND FEELING BUZZED

The wearable market has evolved substantially over a year - I took the plunge and tried it out.

I attended and presented at the Jfokus IoT event last week and during the exhibition I entered a few of the various competitions being held to be a lucky winner of the fitbit chargehr fitness bands - so I took it for a test drive over the last week. At first I was a bit skeptical about them; but now I love it and I do not know why it took me so long to start using them.

The fitbit chargehr is the latest in the fitbit range of products, providing:

• PurePulse™ Heart Rate monitor
• Workouts and All-Day Actvitity
• steps taken
• distance travelled
• floors climbed
• active minutes (based on heart rate zones)
• Goals
• various badges for achievements
• friend and group challenges
• Caller ID and Watch
• Silent Alarms
• Wireless Synchronization

It is one of the better of all the fitness trackers available from the company; on sale for $149.95 USD - depending on the country; amazon.de (german) has it for sale at 149.95 € - you may want to shop around. It was good that mine was provided for FREE :)

It took a bit of time to get used to reminding myself to wear the band; initially it felt a little irritating as I typically never wore a watch or any form of jewellery on my wrists. I did go out on one occasion without the tracker - but it just encouraged me to not forget again.

Any fitness guru may rip me apart based on these stats; but my dashboard shows:

You can see clearly it has been monitoring my heart rate, number of steps, distance travelled, active minutes, and calories burned during the day - I was pleasantly surprised to see my resting heart rate being measured between 61 and 67; averaging 63 overall. Apparently; this means I am in good, almost borderline excellent condition for my age (ref: topendsports.com).

Say what? :) I'm not the athletic type at all - but, heck; you do not argue with technology!

The net result of wearing the tracker; security concerns about how private my data actually is and what someone could actually do with it put aside - is that when I approach a set of stairs when an escalator is present; I remember the floors climbed achievement and opt for the stairs instead. I see myself walking instead of taking the subway or bus; a motivational tool.

If you have been pondering getting one of these - stop it; just go get yourself one.

The hacker in me does want to remove the dependency on the iOS and android application that the company provides; especially since the data is stored on their servers - one does wonder if it would be possible to reverse engineer the BLE protocol so I could write my own sync application using Evothings Studio and have 100% control of my own information.

Challenge accepted? That would be one hell of a plugin to make available to developers.