So i went back to the fitness tracker that first stole my heart, the fitbit, but since our time apart, the fitbit has done some growing up that once very simplistic step. Counter has really evolved into a full, fledged smartwatch with advanced features like stress, tracking and spo2. But with a price tag that goes toe to toe with some of the big players like garmin, polar and even apple, is the new fitbit sense actually worth the price. So i bought it and have been wearing it for the past two weeks along some of my most trusted sleep and fitness trackers, and so in this video i’ll break down its accuracy, discuss the pros and cons of this device and let you know my honest thoughts On whether or not it’s worth making the switch, but first, if you’re new here welcome, my mission is to help you achieve success without sacrificing your health or happiness. I do product reviews weekly so if you’re into this click that subscribe button and join the type a tribe now at first glance, the fitbit sense looks a lot like their versa. Two and three models and in many ways all three devices pretty much have the same core functionalities, including activity tracking sleep data and a six day, battery life and i’m gon na be straight up with you guys if that is literally all you’re. Looking for in a smart watch and i’d say save your money on this one and just go with their entry level.
Versa, 2, because it even has spo2 tracking. But what sets the sense, apart from the rest of the fitbit family, is in a couple of key new features. They’Ve added – and these include all day – stress, monitoring, body, temperature, tracking and very expansive heart rate data, and before i dive deep into my stats. Let’S take a second and address their new sensors, in addition to their built in gps. The fitbit sense also comes with an ecg sensor for heart rate data, a gyroscope for movement, an eda sensor for stress tracking and a dedicated skin temperature sensor, which is supposed to be more accurate than some of their previous models. The eda stress sensor is probably their most impressive feature, as this is the first smart watch of its kind to include that, and here is how you actually activate it. So, on the watch itself, you open up the eda scan app and cover your palm over the screen for two minutes now. This is measuring your electrodermal activity and then gives you a readout of both your eda response and your heart rate changes. Now i question how effective this test is, because i tried it several times over different days and i got zero activity when it came to my eda response. But in addition to that, you also get a daily stress management score out of 100, and this is based on factors like sleep, your heart rate response and physical exertion and again i do question the efficacy of this number, because i was never able to get above 90, despite being very well rested and pretty relaxed most days now i get.
It is not a perfect science and, i would say, don’t rely too heavily on over analyzing your daily score. But i really do commend the company for taking the steps to really bring awareness to this issue of stress management and, i think there’s something to be said. For paying attention to your trends and, of course, the outliers as a way to start making correlations and then hopefully, adjustments around your stress levels and speaking of patterns. Let’S get straight to the data as we take a look at how the fitbit sense compares in terms of accuracy to my sleep devices like the aura ring in dream, 2 and activity tracking with the polar h10 chest strap. Now, on the sleep front, i really had high hopes for the sense, with all these new bells and whistles and sensors they’ve added, but the results i got were rather underwhelming. Now, looking at my deep sleep stats, there were a handful of nights in which the fitbit just really missed the mark when compared to my aura ring and dream 2, either swinging way too high or too low in the opposite direction. Now the overall trend line for my rem, stats on the fitbit stayed pretty fairly consistent to that of the dream 2, which is definitely promising, but the total time for my rem, sleep was off by a staggering amount. A whopping, 40 minute nightly average difference between these two trackers. Now, if the dream 2 is considered, the gold medalist for sleep accuracy and the aura ring is the runner up.
Well then, i guess that puts the fitbit sense somewhere in the bronze category, or maybe even just honorable mention now. Regarding other sleep stats, the fitbit does do a good job. In fact, my overall nightly temperature was only off by a very marginal amount of 0.1 degrees. Fahrenheit from my aura ring and my heart rate, data was nearly identical between the two devices off by only 0.5 beats per minute, and obviously this makes a lot of sense. Given all the hardware improvements they’ve made to the fitbit regarding heart rate data and when it comes to hrv or heart rate, variability, the trend lines for the fitbit and the or ring were also in sync as you’ll see here. But the frustrating part for me about the fitbit is that you can only access your hrv data in a graph form, and you have to do so by logging into the health metrics page on your dashboard. I could not, for the life of me, figure out a way to check the actual stats per day. If you know how please leave a comment below – and this was just immensely frustrating because you can go back and look at your hrv stats with the aura ring. Based on the day, and if you are a data nerd like me, you want to see those numbers, so that would be kind of one of the areas of improvement that i think fitbit really needs to hone in on for future developments.
Now, on to the fitness front, where i took a look at my fitbit sense versus my polar h10, heart rate strap – and i got ta be honest. I really don’t think you’re getting anything special by upgrading to the new sense. I mean it’s easy enough to track your workouts and i do like that. It does vibrate when you enter new heart rate zones during cardio, but i did have a couple of issues with the internal gps losing signal during some of my runs and regarding accuracy. I think the fitbit does a much better job with things like walking and hiking versus more high intensity, workouts like running, for instance, when compared to my polar chest, strap my average heart rate was consistently off by three to four points. During my runs, my total calories burned were off by an average of 68 calories with the fitbit trending in the lower direction, and even my distance was off by a quarter of a mile, even though i started both devices at the same exact time now. For the average runner, probably not a big deal, but given the price of this device, it seems pretty strange to me that a company with the word fit in their title. Wouldn’T have optimized for accuracy on this front and before we get to my final thoughts on the product, let’s first talk about the pros and cons of this device. Now, on the plus side, the fitbit sense has a great battery life of six days and a super fast processing speed.
I think they do a great job in aggregating all of your data and then displaying it for you in a very easy to read dashboard, along with giving you the option to export your wellness reports into a pdf and with the purchase of this device. You actually get access to their premium membership for six months, which includes things like video, workouts and nutrition. Coaching onto the downsides of this device and let’s start with spo2 tracking. To start, you can only do spo2 tracking during sleep, and you have to download a specific watch face in order to access this data and when it comes to watch faces, they have a huge catalog to choose from, but you can only store up to five on Your device at one time not to mention they do have a very limited selection of apps, as opposed to something like the apple watch, there’s no airplane mode with this device, although they do have a do not disturb mode for exercise and sleep, and i got ta, Say it is still pretty limiting for iphone users? You can answer calls through their speaker, but there’s no way to respond directly to a text message unless you’re on an android phone. So if you’ve stuck around to this point well, you can probably guess my thoughts around buying this device. I really do think the company has made some great strides in the smartwatch space by including things like advanced stress, tracking and heart rate data, and i still stand by my belief that you’re going to get more comprehensive sleep data from the sense than you will from The new apple watch 6.
But given the 300 plus price tag and all of the hype around their new sensors, i expected the fitbit sense to just blow me out of the water, but instead it left me floating around a lukewarm pool questioning. If now is the time to dive back into the fitbit ecosystem, fitbit threw a lot of technology at this one, but they didn’t do much to improve their fundamentals, including sleep and fitness tracking and with the google merger on the horizon. I’M. Not sure what more fitbit can offer us at this point as an independent company, so is the sense really worth the plunge. Well, if your main goals are stress, tracking and advanced heart rate monitoring, this is probably a great bet and if you are a die, hard fitbit fan with money to burn well, there really is no better fitbit on the market right now and to be completely honest, I have yet to find a device that perfectly and accurately tracks sleep, fitness and stress all in a single package. So while the fitbit sense might not be perfect in all three categories, at least it does provide them all, but again for anyone just looking to get a baseline for their fitness and sleep stats. There are a ton of options on the market right now for half the price, including fitbit’s own versa and charge models. And of course i will include these resources in the show notes below if you want to go and check them out.
So that is my full. Take on the new fitbit sense and again i think the company has really set the bar for future tech to hopefully include more stress tracking in new wearables, and i thank you guys so much for watching. If you like this video, if you learned something, please make sure to give it a big thumbs up, and if you want to see more videos like this each week, then make sure to click that subscribe button and then head over to that notification. Bell click it and then select all so that you get notified each week.jzJ3gGDAQ40
