Question: Would the monitoring Fitbit be a normal one or do you have a special kind for your patients

Peter Megyesi answered on 18 Mar 2021:

That’s an excellent question! 🙂

We use both.

Fitbit is great because they have all sorts of smart and wearable devices (bands, watches, even scales). They are fairly inexpensive (compared to other brands) but the data they collect is still quite accurate* = lots of people use them. (I guess that’s the reason why Google bought them.)
And most importantly, they provide developers with a fairly robust API. This means that if you want to analyse other people’s data, or build an app that uses that, you can do that fairly easily.

Why use anything else? Because there are still times when you need even more accurate, or specialised data than what Fitbit devices collect.
For example we work with sensors that can track and stream your movements in realtime with a higher precision. Fitbit pretty much “only” cares that you went for a run, but we (or other researchers) need to check the run’s quality as well, i.e. to be able to tell if you are still recovering from an injury and drag a leg or have a balance issue.
Other examples would simply include specialised devices like sleep, blood pressure or blood-glucose monitors etc. Those kind of things fitbits don’t measure (but might in the future of course).