Counting Your Steps and Heartbeats: MIO Gadgets Watch Your Health
MIO puts out several products for keeping track of your health, one measurement at a time. We looked at two of these items, the MIO Step 4 and the MIO Motiva watch. The Step 4 is a very light pedometer that clips onto one’s clothes and the Motiva watch is a handy device that for taking on runs that not only tells time, but tracks heartbeats.
Some people swear by pedometers as a great way to check how much exercise they are getting. It is really the ideal gadget for someone who is trying to watch their health, but hates the process. For some, working with the nifty gadget can even be a primary motivation to watch their health. Our reviewers definitely enjoyed being able to watch their calorie counts and track steps.
The MIO Step 4 Pedometer clips on to a belt or pants. It tracks steps by the bounces you make while you walk. This means that it can be easily tricked by just shaking it of course, but also if you’re walking slowly without much bounce in your step, it might not count it at all. I walked downhill to the theater at one point and the pedometer showed over 1800 steps. Walking back up the San Franisco hills, an obviously more strenuous process, the pedometer told me that I had only gone half the distance.
The Step 4 includes several other tools to manage health besides a pedometer. It can manage up to 5 different users and each user can record height, weight, stride length measurements and other information. Based on this information, it can calculate your body fat, using the built-in body fat analyzer. To do this, a user simply touches two fingers to the sensors and waits a moment. Whether the results are accurate are another matter. I compared online body fat calculators, Wii Fit results and this watch, and came across figures from 15% to 30%, but I suppose the main thing is ability to see if you’ve lost body fat or gained it, and this device can track it.
The Step 4 can also help you track how many calories you burn off through walking or jogging. It also keeps time, and has a small LED flashlight. Different versions are available in different colors; the Step 4 only comes in a metallic green.
After using the pedometer for a while, I came to the conclusion that I wish the LED would light up the screen instead of work as a minimal flashlight. Walking around at night, I wished to check my steps, but the screen was rather dark. And the flashlight requires holding down the button to use, instead of being able to simply toggle a button, or blink for use as a safety device when running. The pedometer function itself, as I mentioned, is rather easy to trick and while I believe all pedometers have that problem, I would have liked it to be just a bit more accurate. Perhaps my main qualm, though, is that for some reason whenever I switched between modes it would erase all of the information about steps taken.
The MIO Motiva Watch has a smorgasbord of tools to help one watch all aspects of their health. It has a handy tab to keep track of the calories you ate for the day. It has 4 different types of timers, especially useful if you’re running or training. It has a heart rate recovery mode that tracks how quickly your heart rate recovers after exercise, a great indicator of personal fitness. And, of course, it has an alarm clock.
The main emphasis of this unisex watch is definitely on measuring one’s heart rate. It is one of the smallest portable heart rate monitors, and allows you to set your heart rate at rest, which it suggests you do upon waking without the aide of an alarm from a restful night’s sleep. It’s obviously meant for runners or joggers and gives advice online about what your target heart rate should be for exercise.
Overall, I find this watch to be useful for exactly what it should be useful for. I am not fond of watches and have long since turned to my cell phone to be my primary clock. However, since I have very recently taken up jogging, I found this watch to be extremely useful in keeping track of how much time I am running, supposed to run, and helping me track my goals in general. The ability to check my heart rate gave me new insight into my workouts that I didn’t have before.
The watch measures heart beat by placing two fingers supposedly gently, but in my case quite forcefully, upon the two sensors on top of the watch. I personally had a lot of difficulty doing this and found that I could not get a good reading when I was either moving or cold. Online suggestions of how to combat this involve licking your fingers before you put them on the sensors, which didn’t seem to help much. Sometimes the readings were erroneous as well, though I get the impression this varies from watch to watch. One evening the watch did not want to give me a reading for over an hour and when it finally did, it told me my heart rate was over 200 beats per minute, which hardly seemed accurate. It is now telling me I am a restful 72 as I write this.
Since the watch tracks the calories you burn based in part upon heart rate, if you take your heart rate while you are using its timer during a workout and it gives you an erroneous measurement, it will show an incorrect number of calories burned. That can be frustrating, to say the least. One note about the Motiva line- several other variations are available, in different colors and sizes and capabilities, aimed at different genders. The regular Motiva model, though, is only available in black.
Either gadget seems like a useful tracker to manage your overall fitness. Both are definitely tailored towards different lifestyles and different fitness management styles, so it should be fairly easy to see which, if either, fit into your life. The concept behind both these products is sound; we just hope the accuracy can be improved on both in the future. The MIO Step 4 retails for about $25 and the MIO Motiva watch retails for anywhere between $90 and $120.
