Fitbit users can track various personal metrics on their Fitbit home page.

In addition to recording activity and calories, the Fitbit provides an online dashboard to manually record weight, blood pressure, glucose levels, and other factors. Because I would frequently look at my dashboard throughout the day, I found myself recording my blood pressure much more regularly. (Thanks to a family history of hypertension, I have a blood pressure monitor at both home and work. But I typically forget to use it for months. And when I have a doctor's appointment, I invariably forget to bring the written record.)

On the negative side, the Fitbit's graph of blood pressure data is fairly low-resolution and would be difficult to share with my doctor. And I couldn't find a way to get the raw data or create a more meaningful printout. So for blood pressure tracking, I ultimately switched over to MedHelp, an online tool that lets you track a multitude of health trends, such as mood, pain, and ovulation, in a higher-resolution graph. Medhelp can be set to send e-mail reminders to update your chosen tracker daily, weekly, or monthly. (A downside to MedHelp's blood pressure tracker: it doesn't allow you to record multiple readings for a single day.)

The MedHelp blood pressure tracker produces a higher-resolution graph that I think will be more useful for my doctor.

By more closely monitoring my blood pressure, I discovered the significant effect that medications can have. Taking ibuprofen for back pain consistently boosts it by 10 or more points. The increases were linked specifically to the medication, rather than to the level of pain. Ibuprofen and other NSAIDS (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) have previously been linked to hypertension, but I didn't know that. I hope I will be able to track these kinds of changes more closely with Withings's new Wi-Fi enabled blood pressure monitor, which recently went on the market in Europe.

Previous Post: How Four-Legged Friends Disrupt Sleep

Tomorrow: Self-tracking Failures

According to Zeo, my cat disrupts my sleep long before I wake up to feed her.

The Zeo sleep monitor is the first consumer device that allows users to track their duration and stages of sleep—REM, deep, and light sleep—during the night. I had tested the Zeo for a few days when it first came out, but using it daily for a few weeks was more illuminating.

I found that sleeping in by an hour dramatically improved my ZQ score—a proprietary algorithm that incorporates sleep duration and quality to create a single number for the night's sleep. That convinced me to give up on attempts to work out in the morning and embrace an evening gym routine.

I also discovered that my cat is wreaking more havoc on my sleep than I thought. She wakes me up for breakfast every morning at 5:30 a.m., but looking at my Zeo data showed that my sleep pattern is disturbed for the hour before that. (Apparently it takes her a while to wake me up.) So I bought an automatic feeder with a timer, which helps.

I'd love to know what she's doing while I sleep and see how our patterns interact. (I briefly considered attaching my Fitbit to her collar.) But Green Goose, a startup that is developing stick-on sensors, says it is soon coming out with its first application, designed for pets. I don't have any additional information at this point, but I will certainly try it out as soon as possible.

Previous Post: The Perils of Too Much Sitting

Tomorrow: Under Pressure

The top graph shows a typical workday as recorded by the Fitbit, while the bottom graph shows a weekend day spent hiking.

The Fitbit is often described as a souped-up pedometer, though its makers chafe at that description. Like pedometers, the thumb-size device, which is worn on the belt or bra strap, has an embedded accelerometer that measures movement. But while the device records the number of steps you've taken and miles walked that day, onboard algorithms calculate the number of calories burned, all of which are reported on a sleek little display.

Pressing a button puts the device in sleep-monitoring mode; you wear it in a wrist strap while sleeping, and data from the accelerometer gives a rough measure of when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and how restless you were during the night.

The best feature for a lazy self-tracker like me is that anytime you're near your computer, the device automatically sends information to an online dashboard, which displays your activity level—"sedentary," "low," "moderate," or "highly active"—in five-minute increments.

The device's small display also has a flower that grows taller when you're active and shrinks to a stub when you're not. My reaction to the flower is a testament to how motivating simple feedback can be; seeing a stubby flower after a long meeting makes we want to go for a brisk walk around the block (1,500 steps).

I am already an active person--I work out five days a week, hike almost every weekend, and usually walk or bike to work—so I didn't think I needed much motivation to be more active. (According to Fitbit, I am in the top 2 percent activity-wise for women my age who use the device.) But the Fitbit made me conscious of all the times I am not moving.

Not surprisingly, the worst culprit is work. The bulk of my weekday is a sad gray line, flanked by blue (low activity) and yellow (moderatey activity) spikes signifying my ride to work and walk to lunch. On the other hand, my time at home in the evenings, which I would describe as fairly sedentary stretches of eating dinner, watching TV, and working on the computer, are nearly continuous blue bars with bolts of yellow.

Given recent reports that sitting is detrimental to your health, my sedentary workdays are worrisome to me. They also highlight a contradiction in workplace wellness; a number of large employers and insurers are providing employees with Fitbits or similar programs to encourage activity. But what they really need to do is figure out how to make the typical office workplace less sedentary. (Unfortunately for me, a half-joking request to TR for a treadmill desk a couple of years ago was resolutely squashed.)