Accuracy Verification of Heart Rate and Energy Consumption Tracking Devices to Develop Forest-Based Customized Health Care Service Programs

This study was carried out to verify the accuracy of fitness tracking devices in monitoring heart rate and energy consumption and to contribute to the development of a forest exercise program that can recommend the intensity and amount of forest exercises based on personal health-related data and provide monitoring and feedback on forest exercises. Among several commercially available wearable devices, Fitbit was selected for the research, as it provides Open API and data collected by Fitbit can be utilized by third parties to develop programs. Fitbit provides users with various information collected during forest exercises including exercise time and distance, heart rate, energy consumption, as well as the altitude and slope of forests collected by GPS. However, in order to verify the usability of the heart rate and energy consumption data collected by Fitbit in forest, the accuracy of heart rate and energy consumption were verified by comparing the data collected by Fitbit and reference. In this study, 13 middle-aged women were participated, and it was found that the heart rate measured by Fitbit showed a very low error rate and high correlation with that measured by the reference. The energy consumption measured by Fitbit was not significantly different from that measured in the reference, but the error rate was slightly higher. However, there was high correlation between the results measured by Fibit and the reference, therefore, it can be concluded that Fitbit can be utilized in developing actual forest exercise programs.