I received the Jawbone Up24 as a Christmas present last December 2013, and since then I have been monitoring my physical activity, sleep and meals on a daily basis. While there are many cursory reviews for Up24 online, I wanted to provide a more in-depth look based on actual use over an extended period of time. I’ve broken things down by the three main areas that the device is supposed to help track / measure.
Physical activity
When it comes to physical activity, where I find the Jawbone Up24 most useful is as a pedometer to track my steps. I have not been able to compare the data with other pedometers to measure accuracy, but I find that I am now constantly trying to take as many steps as I can per day. So whether the data is accurate or not, the fact that I know my steps are being tracked makes me much more aware of basic decisions like: do I really need to drive for lunch, or would it be easy enough to just walk?
In addition to the basic pedometer function, you can keep track of “workouts” by manually entering the type of training (eg, running, weights, cardio, etc.) and intensity (eg, easy, moderate, etc.) And then you simply have to trust that the inputs you chose for the workout are accurate in determining how many calories you burned. For me, training tracking provides limited benefit. It seems like the sole purpose of entering workouts is to add extra calories burned on top of the calories you burn based on your basal metabolic rate. To be fair, I’m not exactly sure what else I’d like to get out of this feature, but since I’m not a calorie counter, it’s certainly questionable whether I should bother logging workouts in the future.
To sleep
When I first heard about Jawbone Up24, what intrigued me the most was the band’s ability to track your “light” and “deep” sleep patterns. It sounds great and is interesting to watch, but the problem is that the data does not seem to be very actionable. For example, I don’t know how to use the fact that I only had 5 h 18 min of light sleep and 1 h 57 min of deep sleep and then increase the amount of deep sleep I get the following night. I have yet to receive personalized suggestions on how to improve my sleep based on my sleep month data so far.
It would be amazing if the Up app automatically extracted the data and found interesting correlations that could help me improve my sleep, but since that hasn’t happened yet, I have to process the data myself. One thing I’m still curious about is whether the amount of time I fall asleep each day (I often hear that I should sleep at 10 PM) has any correlation with the amount of deep sleep I get. Hoping that the data that I have accumulated within the Up app will help me come up with an answer to this question, I went ahead and manually entered the data into a spreadsheet to see if I could spot some useful patterns. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between when I fall asleep and the amount of deep sleep I get at night. That’s a bummer, as I’ve once again no longer had actionable data to help me improve my sleep. It sure would be great if Jawbone could handle this kind of analysis for us.
So is the Up24 totally useless when it comes to sleeping? Not completely. What I have found useful are what they call “Smart Sleep Alarms”, which are basically alarms that you can set that will make the band wake you up by vibrating. In theory, the band is supposed to wake you up only when you are in a light sleep within a window of up to 30 minutes before or after the alarm time. Anyway, I find sleep alarms useful because when you’re not sleeping alone, the vibrating alarm is less likely to wake up the person next to you (and they will thank you!).
Foods
When it comes to keeping track of meals, this is a completely manual process that requires you to enter what you eat, whenever you eat it. There’s really no good way for a piece of tech on your wrist to know what you’re eating, but the app does have a decent database of foods (with nutrition facts) that you can choose from to make your life easier. In the end I would say that the Up app does what it is supposed to do in terms of acting as a food diary to record the things you eat. The key is to do your best to enter accurate data if you expect to get any use for that data. After all, if you enter junk data, any conclusions you draw from the data will also be junk. And similarly to what I said about sleep data in the previous section, the Up app doesn’t seem to do any numerical processing of your data, so you can grab whatever you want from the data.
Personally, I keep logging everything I eat, and the key I have come to realize so far about this new habit is that I need to learn to look at a portion of food and at least be able to come up with a very good estimate of how much it weighs if I want solid data on protein, fat, carbohydrates, calories, etc. that I eat. This discovery has led me to purchase a kitchen food scale that I can use to hone my senses on how much different types of food weigh.
Conclution
So here are some final thoughts. While the Jawbone Up24 may fall short in many ways for those of us who want cleaner and more actionable data, I think tracking something is still better than tracking nothing at all. At the very least, tracking your sleep, meals, and physical activity will make you more aware of the decisions you make regarding the most critical things that make up your day. Plus there’s a cool “Team” feature that essentially acts as your own mini social network made up of other people you know who have an Up band. This social feature is useful for adding a bit of competition and peer pressure to the mix for To continue. In conclusion, despite its shortcomings, I am a fan of the Jawbone Up24 and I recommend that you take a look if you want to start getting used to measuring your life.