BodyMedia Fit Review

There’s no shortage of fitness apps and devices, but the BodyMedia Fit is one of the most technologically innovative and useful exercise aids out there. While most competing products-- be they purely app-based or external devices-- tend to be little more than glorified pedometers, the Fit measures all your activity right down to how well you sleep.

The Fit’s armband device is available either with Bluetooth or without. The Bluetooth version (the $249 Armband BW) syncs with the BodyMedia Fit Mobile software, allowing your iPhone or Android phone to receive near real-time data from the armband. Opting for the somewhat cheaper non-Bluetooth version means you’ll have to sync the armband to your PC, whereupon the mobile software will download the data from the site.

BodyMedia has gone to great lengths to tout the accuracy of their technology, and it certainly seems to work well. Just strap the armband to your bicep so the sensors are in contact with your skin, then go about your day. You don’t need to have your phone for the Fit to work, and you can just as easily have the activity monitor installed on a tablet at home. The armband can hold two weeks’ worth of data before you have to upload the information to either the PC web-based software or a mobile device, and it also has excellent battery life.

The Fit tracks your physical activity, including calories burned, steps taken, exertion level and duration, and how much sleep you’ve had, through a variety of sensors. Aside from a three-axis accelerometer to measure steps and motion, the Fit detects skin temperature and fluctuations, and sweat level. What all these sensors amount to is an amazingly detailed analysis of your daily activity.

Whether your day includes leisurely walks, a hardcore Zumba session, or just doing the laundry, the Fit will prove that you did something. Of course, the armband device is fairly useless without the activity manager software, and it’s here that the Fit’s biggest strengths and weaknesses lie. Overall, the app-- no matter what platform-- is a great tool for laying out the end result of your day, or creating a custom, timed workout session. You create an account, sync your armband, enter your data (height, weight, age, etc.), and the software formulates daily activity and calorie goals.

In addition to tracking how many calories you burn, the software has an excellent food tracking tool. The food database is expansive, so it’s easy to search for specific things, including major chain fast food. If you’re diligent about keeping track of your eating choices, seeing all this data together can potentially be an incredible motivator for getting you to change your daily habits.

Granted, that means wearing the armband for most of the day, every day, which is unlikely to be ideal for a lot of people. The manual says not to wear it more than 23 hours at a time, and you’ll have to plug it in to charge it every few days. Once the armband is on, it’s relatively comfortable, but still not an ideal contraption to wear for extended periods of time.

All this functionality comes at a cost, though. The Armband BW itself lists for about $250, but on top of that, the Fit software works on a subscription plan. The app is free to download, but actually using it will set you back $12.95 a month for the month-by-month plan or $6.95 a month for a full 12-month service agreement. You can also gift a subscription to others, which is a nice, if (we suspect) possibly dangerous way to go.

That’s a lot of spare change to throw down for something that, frankly, most people do so haphazardly. We’d feel a lot better about wholeheartedly recommending the Fit if there was a lower-tier free version of the software, or at least a 90-day trial period. The Fit is the sort of device that would also be perfect for letting curious friends borrow, but the subscription model makes this rather problematic.

Another issue with the current version of the mobile app is that it doesn’t offer the same level of detail as the PC Web-based interface. The ability to look at an hour-by-hour timeline of daily activity is fantastic, but unavailable in the mobile versions. Inexplicably, the mobile apps are incapable of uploading data directly to the activity manager’s web-based server, although downloading past data from the website works fine.

The Fit requires you to separately sync the device’s data to the PC before your account will be synced across the board, which defeats the whole purpose of a Bluetooth connection. Another caveat is the lack of a user-friendly mobile calendar. To check your performance from a specific date, the app actually requires you to swipe through each day manually. A simple option to bring up a standard month-by-month calendar and compare specific dates should be standard, yet is lacking.

So while you could conceivably use the mobile app exclusively, it’s disappointing that not all functionality is available this way. We like the iPhone version’s more detailed information pages when switching to landscape mode-- an option the current Android version lacks. Conversely, the Android’s option to use home screen widgets for quickly checking activity is excellent as well.

Even with these flaws, the BodyMedia Fit system is, bar none, the best fitness gadget we’ve seen, provided you’re serious about getting into shape and understand the need to make changes in your lifestyle. Its ability to track all your activity is a significant distinction from the Nike+ and most other fitness devices. Much like getting fit in general, however, the Fit requires a real commitment in both time and cost. There are plenty of free and cheap apps for both platforms that do a lot of similar things (track steps, calories, food, etc.), which would be a better place for novices to start. However, if you want the ultimate mobile fitness aid, the Fit is definitely it.