What brand do you recommend, one that can't be shook so easily to add steps and is accurate?
Pedometers contain sensor mechanisms that respond to vertical acceleration. If you opened up a pedometer, you'd find a suspended lever arm inside that moves up and down each time you take a step. It doesn't really matter what causes the vertical acceleration. If it's in your hand, you could shake it up and down. That's vertical acceleration.
If you have it on your waistband and you're riding in a car and hit a bump, that's vertical acceleration. If it is sitting upright on your dresser and an earthquake occurs, that could very likely produce vertical acceleration.
Now, if you wear it on your waistband while your are ambulating--walking, running, etc.--, that movement also produces vertical acceleration, and your pedometer will respond to it.
In all of these cases the pedometer responds by closing an electrical circuit, and that counts as a step. Some pedometers' sensor mechanisms are "smarter" and engineered better than others and do a better job at counting steps when worn on one's waistband. Therefore, just like anything else, the quality of pedometers varies.
There are three general types of pedometers. The top-of-the-line are called piezoelectric pedometers (also sometimes called accelerometers). The best examples are the NEW-LIFESTYLES NL-series piezoelectric pedometers (www.new-lifestyles.com). Instead of moving parts inside, they have a strain gauge which bends instead of clicks. They are highly accurate, reliable and last a very long time. Since they don't make any clicking sounds--they are silent counters and therefore the reinforcement to keep shaking them is absent.
The second type are called coiled spring pedometers, like the gold standard DIGI-WALKER pedometers. You'll get the biggest bang for you buck from a DIGI-WALKER pedometer (http://www.digiwalker.com).
If your budget is extremely tight and you can't afford a NL-series or DIGI-WALKER pedometer, then the third type are hairspring pedometers. Activity Technologies pedometers are the "best of the hairspring" pedometers, which are a good alternative (www.new-lifestyles.com). They won't last as long as, i.e., maintain their accuracy as long as, the DIGI-WALKER SW-series coiled spring pedometers or the NL-series piezoelectric strain gauge pedometers.
--Teresa Vollenweider, Fitness & Pedometer Expert
NEW LIFESTYLES, INC.
Copyright 2007.
