Do fitness trackers really profit our health? Researchers say they’re actually quite effective in improving physical activity.

Fitness trackers have develop into a component of many individuals’s each day lives, especially amongst those trying to increase their physical activity. Such wearable activity trackers are a “low price tool” to assist people address their physical inactivity, researchers noted in a paper, published in Lancet Digital Health.

There was a whopping 1,444% boom in wearable tracker shipment worldwide from 2014 to 2020. Despite the demand, there remains to be quite a little bit of skepticism about their effectiveness.

The research team analyzed 39 experimental studies on the effectiveness of wearable activity trackers. This included nearly 164,000 users from the world over, covering each clinical and healthy people in all age groups.

They found “consistent evidence” that such devices actually affect people’s physical activity. Specifically, the outcomes suggested that using these devices helped improve physical activity, body composition and fitness equivalent to 40 more minutes of walking per day (1,800 extra steps) and a couple of kilo reduction in body weight.

“The general results from the studies we reviewed show that wearable activity trackers are effective across all age groups and for long periods of time,” study lead researcher Ty Ferguson, of the University of South Australia (UniSA), said in a news release. “They encourage people to exercise regularly, to make it a part of their routine and to set goals to drop pounds.”

“Taking into account these weren’t weight reduction studies, but lifestyle physical activity studies, so we would not expect dramatic weight reduction,” added UniSA Professor Carol Maher, who was a co-author of the study, referring to the one kilo weight reduction. “The typical person gains about 0.5 kg a 12 months in weight creep so losing 1kg over five months is important, especially when you think about that two thirds of Australians are chubby or obese.”

Other than these physical advantages, they could have mental health advantages as well. The devices helped improve depression and anxiety by increasing physical activity, Ferguson said.

This highlights the effectiveness of such activity trackers in boosting physical activity. The study provides “sufficient evidence” to recommend using them, in accordance with the researchers.

Such low-cost and user-friendly tools could prove useful in today’s world, where physical inactivity has develop into a “major threat to population health.”

“Low-cost interventions to deal with physical inactivity in clinical and non-clinical populations which might be suited to the demands of recent lifestyles are needed,” the researchers wrote. “Wearable activity trackers (consumer devices that provide feedback to the wearer, equivalent to fitness trackers, activity-tracking smartwatches, and pedometers) could meet this need.”