published in The Lancet Digital Health<\/a> found activity trackers helped people take roughly 1,800 extra steps a day.<\/p>\nBut understanding those numbers requires context. A 2026 review of Apple Watch studies found heart-rate readings were generally close to reference measurements, while calorie estimates were often off.<\/p>\n
“You shouldn’t ever just assume that the data you’re getting from your tracker is completely accurate,” said Dr. Clark Madsen, an Intermountain Health sports medicine physician.<\/p>\n
According to Madsen, basic physical movement can easily throw off a sensor’s accuracy, meaning an unexpected spike or dip on your screen doesn’t necessarily mean something’s wrong.<\/p>\n
(A fitness tracker) shouldn’t replace a provider, and it shouldn’t replace your own general idea of how you’re doing.\u2013Dr. Clark Madsen<\/p>\n
“One of the biggest issues we have is people will come in worried about one little blip instead of looking at the bigger trend,” he said.<\/p>\n
Madsen noted that he sees patients become anxious over the numbers. He encourages users to consider device information along with how they actually feel physically, rather than focusing exclusively on a screen.<\/p>\n
“We shouldn’t rely on that data to tell us that everything’s okay when it’s only measuring small data points and not giving us the full picture,” Madsen said.<\/p>\n
Madsen recommends following up with a medical provider about repeated unusual readings or a health alert.<\/p>\n
“It shouldn’t replace a provider, and it shouldn’t replace your own general idea of how you’re doing,” he said.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 From smartwatches to smart rings, wearable devices can collect vast amounts of information about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":884283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[1302,3811,337,97,3812,134,3729,3,3813,3814,99,1505,2987,3324,2986],"class_list":["post-884282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-fitness","tag-health","tag-homes","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}