Sport will not perpetuate human existence. It was originally created to keep humans in shape for hard the graft of living off the land. Just look at any aboriginal culture, they knew they had done enough steps today when they had enough food.
The fitness tracker was created to make you feel better about being taken for a ride (in life). For those who needs affirmation from their peers that they arnt wasting there life away working for a whatever click bait porn floats onto there device next.
20 yrs from now? we already have big piles of ewaste everywhere.
I once interviewed for a startup making bluetooth diapers for old folks ~2013.
My recommended fitness tracker is to turn off all your devices and go outside into nature at every opportunity. Find a company who will let you be a remote developer and start living for today.*
I'm healthier and more active now because of them, and they've gotten me more in tune with my body, not less.
Over the years, I've found that simply forcing myself every morning to step on the weight scale is a keystone habit in keeping my weight in check.
I do this with other things which I consider important as well, like tracking the finances.
Most of the industry subsides on the aspirational user who doesn't make any lifestyle change and stops wearing the device after a year or less. The vague idea that it'll find some magic ingredient for improving your sleep or exercise.
Even Garmin is getting in on it trying to sell activity trackers for parents to put on their kids. When it's parents who are in full control of their kids' time and activity.
Of course it has a use for people training but that's a small minority of customers.
Here's the copy on a recent device:
"Meet our most advanced fitness & health tracker with tools like an on-wrist ECG app for heart health,* EDA Scan app for stress management and more. Get a 6-month membership of Fitbit Premium™** and optimize your routine with Daily Readiness Score.◆‡ Add a 6-month Premium membership for advanced insights & tools to improve your health"
Guaranteed most customers would benefit from finding exercise they enjoy, drinking less alcohol and worrying less about their sleep rather than being presented with Scores and Goals whose novelty and thus salience will quickly wear off. But that isn't something that can be sold so...
Better fitness technology leads to faster times across the board.
Either you just wrote without thinking about it for one second, or you actually think that. I'm not up for exploring either option, and there is no third.
I think it'd be hard to say measuring something in order to improve on it is useless: and most of the smart devices allow one to extract exactly that value.
Now, I wouldn't be the one to discredit social and psychological value for any smart devices, because they can be very real too, but it's definitely obvious that we should look for alternative solutions to those problems at the same time.
I can only hope it's a future in which we collectively realized that smartphones, smartwatches, smartglasses, smartypantstoilets, smartgloves, smartdiapers, etc, were a bloody well idiotic idea and that we've come to our collective senses and realized that they were never what they promised to be, but had, within a few years of launch, turned into just more ways of monopolizing attention for a quick venture capital and IPO payout. Perhaps not the hardware manufacturers, but at least the way the hardware was used.
More realistically, those are likely to be dim memories of the past, back before capitalism ran the planet into the ground, and took most of our technology stacks with it. Modern tech stacks are complexity, piled on complexity, built on a few stacks of complexity, built on broken hardware that's overly complex in an attempt to gain the performance required to run the teetering stacks on top of it (all the uarch vulns, DDR4 Rowhammer is a nice touch on top, etc).
You'll note that neither of those paths involve us running around with the FitBit 2050 gathering... whatever it is it thinks it ought to gather. The way things are going, probably nothing more useful than Covid tracking stuff. "You were in proximity with 1.7 potential individuals who may have been infected with Covid, please quarantine for the next two weeks. confetti"
It would be nice if we had some of our current technology, that open data standards had taken root and we could decide how we wanted to use the stuff, pay appropriately and be paid appropriately for our devices, attention, etc. But that's just not the way things are going, and I fear that's not the way things are going to go, under any reasonable future. There is far, far too much money and "Well, but, see, if you destroy the market you can monopolize it!" money floating around for the near to moderate future to see that future happen. I mean, a bunch of our current companies are literally based on "We will use the venture capital money to undercut everyone else, drive them out of business, and then be the monopoly!" Uber, Lyft, [insert the food delivery service of the week here], the various scooter services, and the list goes on. They're running into the brick wall of, "Wait... what do you mean, we're not going to accomplish that? You mean we have to turn a profit?" I've talked to people who have started taking taxis again, because at least they'll show up, unlike the Sharing Economy Rideshare App of The Future services that weren't remotely pandemic-proof.
We'll see. But I would predict that fitness trackers, in 20 years, are a big pile of ewaste, "... ugh, yeah, you know, it's not worth the hassle to get that data out...," and broken promises. And hopefully not being actively worn by then.