Fitbits are great gizmos for the curious and the quantitative. For example, I’ve explored activity levels of different specialties in medicine, seeing how different an average day is working as one kind of doctor versus another.
But lately I’ve been more interested in Fitbits as tools for strengthening family ties between far-flung members of my family. With parents and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles spread across six states, keeping in touch with everyone is infrequent and requires deliberateness.
The networking capability of Fitbits — to be “Fitbit Friends” with someone — can help us keep in better touch. Fitbits create avenues for casual, frictionless, ad hoc interactions between various members of our family, even as we are all spread out geographically. As we become connected on Fitbit, we can have camaraderie with negligible effort. Just by tapping open the Fitbit app on our phones, we can see how active everyone else is that day. Which then, inevitably, leads to playful banter. Encouraging each other, teasing each other, being inspired by each other. Having a sense of what is going on — at least physically — in each other’s lives.
Connecting with each other on Fitbit isn’t really at all about competition; rather, it is about connecting across space, even as we are all so busy and far away from each other.
I’ve worked over the last several months to get various members of my family equipped with a Fitbit, and then connected as friends to everyone else. The image below shows our current state of connections (with a green “Y” indicating a Fitbit Friend connection, and a red “N” indicating no such connection, yet). While we still have work to do in completing all the connections between each other — and several people don’t even have a Fitbit yet — we do have an impressive start to our web.
