Mining and analysis of public information for insight into personal fitness tracker reliability, operations and user performance

Personal fitness trackers are popular wearable devices intended for measurement and analysis of user personal activities, and engagement with social media. Manufacturers have not opened tracker technical designs or performance data to public scrutiny. By leveraging user-posted activity records, product reviews, fitness app screenshots, and social network postings, we were able to characterize user motivations, reliability concerns, and social behaviors, as well as quantifying fitness activity performance levels. We describe user behaviors categorized by gender, age, duration of device ownership, and degree of social network engagement. Lastly, we show that most users exercise less than the well-publicized 10,000 steps per day goal.

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