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Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Fitbit For 'Highly Inaccurate' Heart Rate Trackers (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A class action lawsuit against Fitbit may have grown teeth following the release of a new study that claims the company's popular heart rate trackers are "highly inaccurate." Researchers at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona tested the heart rates of 43 healthy adults with Fitbit's PurePulse heart rate monitors, using the company's Surge watches and Charge HR bands on each wrist. Subjects were then hooked up to a BioHarness device that produced an electrocardiogram (ECG), to record the heart's rhythm against the data being produced by Fitbit's devices. Comparative results from rest and exercise -- including jump rope, treadmills, outdoor jogging and stair climbing -- showed that the Fitbit devices miscalculated heart rates by up to 20 beats per minute on average during more intensive workouts. The study was commissioned by the Lieff Cabraser, the law firm behind the class action suit that is taking aim at three Fitbit models that use the PurePulse heart monitor, including the Fitbit Blaze, Fitbit Charge HR and Fitbit Surge. "What the plaintiffs' attorneys call a 'study' is biased, baseless, and nothing more than an attempt to extract a payout from Fitbit. It lacks scientific rigor and is the product of flawed methodology," Fitbit said in a statement posted by Gizmodo.
http://www.consumerreports.org...
The new testing confirmed our earlier results: Both the Charge HR and Surge were very accurate when compared to the reference Polar H7 ECG monitor. During nearly every trial, the variance between the chest strap and the Fitbit devices amounted to no more than three heartbeats per minute.
However, there was one exception: When our female tester wore the Fitbit Charge HR on her wrist and got up to higher intensity levels, the margin of error crept upwards. During one run, when the chest strap read 150 bpm, the Fitbit Charge HR read 144 bpm. During the second run, the device read only 139 bpm. That problem went away when she wore the Charge HR on her forearm. (And the Fitbit Surge was accurate no matter how it was worn.)
Right... Companies shouldn't be held accountable just because they made a crap product that advertises functionality that it doesn't have. It's all those idiot users' fault for believing that consumer protection laws should require a product to do what is advertised.
The company's website has a lot to say about how the type of exercise, range of motion, and the way the device is worn can affect the accuracy of heartbeat measurement, and they make no claims at all regarding measurement accuracy. It doesn't appear to me that they are advertising great accuracy at all. Aside from that, this is not a case of the company running afoul of consumer protection laws; it's a case of lawyers seeking a profit from a dodgy class-action suit. The consumers who were putatively damaged won't see much in the way of an award, which is the norm in cases like this.