The Problems with Fitness Studies Based on Activity Apps Response Essay According to Megan Molteni in an article on Wired, Stanford university frequently uses data mining to sift, sort, and search smartphone data to discover previously undiscovered intelligence. In her persuasive essay “The Problem with Fitness Studies Based on Activity Apps,” the people at Stanford university have the hope that they can use smartphone data from apps on the iPhone to research the connection between how active people are to obesity rates. King, the leader of this center has confidence that he can guide people, through apps, in the current moment that they need to get up and move by tracking their habits and making an inference at their future weight gain probability. …show more content…
The lack of information such as the wealthier individual being more inclined to use a fitness app or racial and lifestyle influences restrict the amount of theories that can be analyzed and leaves scientist with a self-selected test group. This limitation leaves an unreliable depiction of obesity and cannot be utilized to identify, oversee, and foresee possible weight gain. Similarly, storing as much as five million data points a day per person in contrast to 1440 respectively, would not only be unwanted by its users because of serious power consumption but it would cost the company that makes the app a substantial amount of money for expanding the storage capacity. The data that the apps produce is prepackaged, and therefore is not reliable enough in the sense that they cannot take all things necessary into account. Molteni expresses that acquiring the raw data scientists need is not unattainable but unrealistic because of the lack of cooperation from phone companies such as google and apple. The price of data does not get lowered just because it is a good cause and the batteries in cell phones are not advanced enough to handle the impact for an extensive amount of