I have seen a huge increase in the number of people out and about running. Perhaps they all ran on treadmills at the gym before (we are permitted to leave the house once a day for a run/walk/cycle), but from my anecdata I've seen perhaps a 5x to 10x increase in other runners out when I am running in London so a drop in activity does not tally with my personal and limited observations.
It would not surprise me one jot to see that retirees (i.e. those most vulnerable to corvid) are not out and moving around as much.
I wonder if the trends are hiding larger swings in both directions.
- Screen time usage - Air quality over time - Baby births (in 9 months) - Etc.
I'm sure we'll see more of this in due time.
For example we could imagine the scenario where some people were able to keep their habit and did not have a great decrease in step numbers, while some other sub-groups have become sedentary because of the confinement. This would show up as an increase in variance in the number of steps.
Stats are hard and it is very easy to draw a wrong conclusion (that sound right) from aggregated data.
This is normally a high-growth time of year for us and February had started out REALLY well for us. We started to see a bit of a flattening of growth, and then March hit.
We're down 30% week on week for the past two weeks. This is amalgamated across visitors to our own site as well as the our API customers users. Everyone is being hit.
Most users come from the USA and Europe (France, Spain, UK, and Italy in particular).
A bunch of race events also use our tech, and of course, that has all disappeared.
Back when I wore a fitness tracker, I typically didn't bother to put it on when I was staying home, including work from home days. It stays on the dresser next to my wallet, which doesn't get put in my pocket when I'm staying home.
I am going for long walks several times a day, in order to ensure I'm getting my exercise. I'm just not bothering to bring anything other than my house keys and maybe my cell phone when I do it.
Yeah that's going to be particularly significant for certain countries. Obviously globally, the year-over-year trend is significant, but if you're going to plot it in such a way that emphasizes certain countries, it would be good to know if e.g. Spain also had rain this past week but not this week last year.
It's also pretty much an advert "Try a free 90-day trial of Fitbit Premium"
Also there may be an issue of privacy WRT your personal data, even if this is aggregated and anonymised for this particular article.
No, thank you.
> We’ve laid out the data—now we want to provide you with some tips to stay healthy and active
Great segue! I read that as "We know this data isn't interesting that's why all we could do is lay it out. This is our attempt of monetizing our precious data by creating a clever way to push our product."
This just seems yet another company using COVID-19 to generate profit by offering a free limited trial of their paid service. They also promote a hand-washing app. I find that pretty hilarious. If you can remember to use the app you can remember to count on your own.
