10 hottest products for Millennials – Fitbit Alta HR

What is it?

Fitbit Alta HR is one of the latest in Fitbit’s series of dedicated fitness trackers. It’ll track all the usual things from steps to sleep to calories burned, but adds in the ability to continuously monitor your heart rate too. This means you can get a better idea of your overall health, as well as improving the quality of the other data it gathers.

Why should you buy it?

There are dozens of dedicated fitness trackers around, but we think the Fitbit Alta HR is the one you should look at because it includes almost all the features you could ever need at a price that’s not so high it will break the bank – around £125 in stores.

The stand out feature is continuous heart rate monitoring. This is important not only because it’s valuable health data on its own: it also greatly improves the quality of the other data that it’s gathering. Without heart rate data, any figure of calories burned will be an estimation based solely on whatever you’ve told your tracker about your height, weight, age and gender. By including the heart rate as well, it’ll give you a much more precise number.

And unlike a lot of heart rate trackers, the Fitbit Alta HR is pretty accurate. We compared data recorded by the Alta HR with a MyZone MZ-3 chest belt during a brisk walk and found that, despite not tracking the chest belt beat for beat, at the end of the walk, the average heart rate it reported was largely spot on.

It also means Fitbit’s sleep tracking can be more accurate, showing more granular information about your sleep patterns in the app. Dubbed Sleep Stages, this new system indicates not only light, deep and awake states, it also tells you how long you spend in the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep state and combines everything in a new graph in the Fitbit app. 

And it does all this without making you look like some kind of cyborg. The Alta HR is stylish, with interchangeable straps and a comfortable fit. If you’re looking for a fitness tracker, this is the one to get.

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