If you use Google Calendar, then a recent feature (depending on your market) was added aiming at helping you find time in your schedule to meet your goals.  Although the goals can be fitness based they could also be adapted to say learning a language or whatever takes your fancy.

It seems simple to set up and as things inevitably get in the way it will shift around your appointments to find the time for you to meet that goal.  It seems like a cool feature especially for me as I often find things to fill my day so I can avoid going to the gym!  Goals will soon reschedule around one of my "reasons I can't go to the gym" and say "hey you could go at xxxxx instead".  Great :-(   (I hate the gym!).

Not sure if this will be a permanent Google Calendars feature or if its just one of Google's test projects but its an interesting thing anyway.

To find out more about Google Goals click here.

At least that seems to be the case according to large parts of the media.  Frustratingly, it seems that never a day goes by without some story or other emerges about how Fitness Trackers don't count steps properly, don't show calories properly, they allow big brother to see your private data, will give you a rash or some such other ailment and likely give you exercise mania. Therefore, users must be stupid to use them, and in fact would be better off ditching their deluded fitness lifestyles and getting back on the couch.

But isn't the real story here, that millions of people have improved their fitness, lost weight and now lead far healthier lifestyles because they are using fitness trackers to monitor their activity levels?  Surely this is something to be celebrated not derided?  

Taking this further, if millions of people are improving their health, then logically they are reducing the strain on our health services, at their own costs! Why is this not a good news story?  Why is no one researching the positive impacts of these devices instead of working so hard to point out their flaws?

I would suggest that most users understand that a relatively cheap device (compared to a research lab full of technicians and expensive kit) is not going to be 100% accurate, that's not really the point.  The point is that some feedback is better than none if it gets you up and moving.  

We could wait until the devices get closer to 100% accuracy, but the devices that we have today are already helping people (witness the before and after photos regularly posted to social media) so why wait till then.  Motivating people to adopt a healthier lifestyle is not easy and if these devices with their current flaws achieve that, then in my book that's a good thing.

Let's not kill a positive health trend by a continuous drip, drip of negative articles that seem to try to make users look foolish.  In these days of various unhealthy lifestyle epidemics (diabetes and obesity to name but two), anything that helps people get motivated to help themselves is a personal and societal gain.

So no, Fitness Tracker users are not stupid, just maybe, more enlightened!