More seriously, there's plenty of literature out there about these things; spend 5 minutes on Google and you'll find all of these recommendations. You'll know that exercising will help you sleep. You'll read as well that screens tend to disturb our sleeping patterns. These are becoming common sense and shouldn't require you to run you own little experiment to figure it out.
If you want to improve the quality of your life, I doubt a fitbit will help you. You already know what you should be doing starting with the obvious ones:
- Exercise more,
- Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...),
- Sleep more,
- Drink less.
1) Saying "well, you could just find this information some other way" may be true but useless - everyone has different mechanisms that work well for them. If it takes a device or app or whatever for someone to stick with a change they want to make, then good for them.
2) While there is definitely some general health and fitness advice that would benefit most people, it's terribly naive to believe the story ends there. Population averages are just that, every person will also have specific mechanisms and effects that are important to their own wellbeing and not particularly generalizable.
1. It matters to me because I see this as a waste of resources (hardware, software, brains) for something that is near obvious. While it's anyone's choice to consume the way they want, I am just morally opposed to it.
2. What these apps address are general health/fitness metrics, in a very superficial manner. As I said, once we have more meaningful tracking I'll be onboard, for now these are rudimentary toys.
- Exercise more, - Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...), - Sleep more, - Drink less.
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And as an insomniac I was having trouble with 'sleep more'. People with worse insomnia than me have to go sleep clinics to work out how to improve their situation. Mine wasn't bad enough to warrant that but fortunately there was an app to allow me to do a little of my own research. Without it I wouldn't be able to tell the time it took me to fall asleep - as I would be asleep.
Google does not interpolate those suggestions from your personal data, that's where the fitbit etc. apps shine.
- Having a glass of water - Going for a short walk - Having a glass of wine - Watching a movie/tv show with your partner - Telling a bedtime story to your kids - Washing the dishes while thinking about your day - Talking to your mum/dad/bro/sis - listening to some calming music - having a shower
How would you know what contributed to your good night sleep?
Having an app/tool tracking these for you and telling you that your best sleep is when you do A C and F not E or G is very valuable.
If you are smart enough to track and figure it out, then heck, I think you have too much free time or you are highly intuitive of yourself
Podcasts and music don't require screens, though, so I don't see why you're assuming that was the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirst#Elderly
You pretty much have to tell old people to drink, after they're too old to know they need to drink.
Its also "semi well known" that cold weather tends to mask thirst symptoms, and the resulting dehydration doesn't help much WRT hypothermia prevention, so this claim is, again, not people in general, but the subset of people in an environment colder than they're used to.
Beyond those two metrics I can't think of anything it'd be useful to check regularly. Reflex time or achilles reflex test might be good.
I'm just assuming that you are within the average age group of hacker news readers (somewhere between 20 and 40 years) it's not really recommended for you to be above 75bpm.
The idea that a lower pulse rate is better comes from the observation that endurance athletes have low resting pulse rates, and it is generally assumed that endurance exercise is healthy. The truth is that high volume exercise suppresses the metabolism and compromises health.
Sprinters and strength athletes do no get a suppressed heart rate. It's only endurance athletes and others who train high volume.
This is well understood by a lot of trainers. Low pulse and low body temperature in the morning is an easy way to measure over-training.
People need to get it through their heads that highly trained "fit" athletes are not very healthy, as a general rule. They tend to develop problems relatively young. Marathon running is worst of all, each marathon run showing a statistical reduction in life span.
