At Dan’s Plan, we develop tools that analyze your lifestyle data and provide you with feedback that you can use to make more informed health decisions. To make this data collection even easier, we’ve made it our goal to integrate our tools with various devices that automatically collect and transmit your information to your Dan’s Plan account. Two great examples of such devices include the Withings Wifi scale, which wirelessly and automatically sends your weight to your Dan’s Plan account each morning after you step on the scale (awesomeness!) and now, the FitBit which wirelessly and automatically sends information on your sleep to your Dan’s Plan account (more awesomeness).
When you wear the Fitbit at night (comfortably on the wrist - see video above), it measures aspects of your sleep such as sleep efficiency, awakenings, and time in bed. Comfort is important because the last thing you want is your sleep monitor messing up your rest. This can be an issue with other sleep tracking devices and is an important advantage of the Fitbit. We are working on an update to provide additional analysis so that you not only have a realistic idea of the amount of sleep you’re getting, but more importantly, so that you know if you’re getting enough sleep! Stay tuned.
When you track your sleep, you begin to gain insight into how sleep affects your daytime performance. How you feel and perform today is not only affected by how you slept last night, but also how you slept over the last week and month. When I average close to 8 hours per night for more than a week, I perform well. If I don’t get the amount of sleep that I desire, the tangible, visual feedback our tools provide helps me gain awareness and understanding of whether I’m living a healthy lifestyle and, in this case, motivates me to get my hind quarters into bed earlier. Your optimal sleep time might differ. Know thyself.
Not only does the Fitbit collect sleep info at night, but when you wear it during the day, it counts the number of steps you take and the miles you travel. Research suggests that the number of daily steps one takes correlates with health parameters such as weight maintenance and insulin sensitivity. Read: Get your 10K steps per day people! We plan to integrate step data next and we will soon explain how steps are a critical component to an overall healthy movement strategy when we release our Enduring Mover chapter. Remember, we want to help everyone live as an Intelligent Eater, Enduring Mover and Restorative Sleeper. The purpose of our Enduring Mover philosophy is to help you meet physical challenges and to enjoy the gifts of movement for the longest duration within your life. Inherent to both of these objectives is the resistance to chronic, degenerative disorders which are affected by lifestyle including daily movement and nightly sleep. Fitbit helps you track both. Get your 10K steps per day, and make sure you’re getting the sleep you need. We’ll share the other critical components of our Enduring Mover philosophy soon (total teaser).
Why integrate your data with Dan’s Plan?
We take the information these devices collect and provide additional insight so you can get the most benefit from the data collected. If you have one or both of these devices and want to integrate them with Dan’s Plan, click on the Integrations link on the left hand side of your My Plan page and our set-up wizard will walk you through the simple and quick integration process.
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Dan