Telegraph: Apple Watch Effectively Motivates Users to Lead a Healthier Lifestyle

The Telegraph’s Rhiannon Williams has posted a review of the Apple Watch’s fitness features. Williams says that the gentle coaxing and achievements makes leading a healthy lifestyle a lot easier.

Williams says that the Apple Watch is definitely one of the most attractive fitness tracking devices on the market. The wearable device uses an accelerometer to track your body movement. In addition, the device uses photodiode sensors to measure your heart rate. The lack of built-in GPS is something a lot of reviewers have been disappointed with, however, the Apple Watch does a good job at tracking your activity without your iPhone.

“While this doesn’t bother me because I use my phone to play music while running, it may come as a disappointment to those used to trackers with in-built GPS.”

The Apple Watch offers users incentives that will help them complete various exercise targets. The Workout app offers you a variety of workouts to choose from and will allow you to set a target goal to strive for as you are exercising.

“Once you’ve selected your activity, you’re given the option to set the amount of calories you want to burn, distance you want to cover or time you want to exercise for, as well as a specific goal you want to achieve before pressing Start. I chose to put it through its paces through a mixture of running outdoors – my preferred form of exercise – and a series of ‘Other’ workouts geared towards calorie burn.

During your run, lifting your wrist towards you wakes it and displays the length of time you’ve been chugging away, the distance you’ve covered, the calories burned and your heartbeat. When you’re halfway through your workout, the Watch taps you to let you know. It also does this for every mile you run (the default setting), and once you complete your allotted goal.”

The Activity app will monitor how many calories you burned (Move), how many minute of activity above a brisk walk you’ve accumulated during the day (Exercise), and how minutes you’ve stood up and walked around (Stand).

“I like the fact that Activity only counts ‘brisk’ exercise towards your daily goal, and discounts meandering around the office that shouldn’t really be counted. In the past, I’ve found fitness trackers which measure movement purely by the number of steps you’ve taken, e.g. working towards a slightly arbitrary 10,000 step goal per day, haven’t taken account of the intensity of movement, so this was a welcome improvement.

Apple bills the app as a motivational tool for helping you move around more, mainly through tapping you if you’ve been sedentary for the first 50 minutes of an hour to remind you to walk around for a minute to meet your minimum of 12 minutes standing per half day. A feature which initially seems quite annoying, it quickly becomes part of your work day, and is as good an excuse as any to take a stroll or make a tea. However, I found it reminded me to stand up almost immediately after sitting down on a couple of occasions, suggesting it’s not always entirely accurate, and some people may truly hate the nagging reminders.”

Overall, Williams finds the fitness features of the Apple Watch to be effective and they’ve helped her live a healthier life. Be sure to read the full review from this link.