Is Mi Band A Good Buy?

With all the stuff going on about Gushcloud (not that anyone cares about me), this is not an ad. Xiao Mi didn't put me up to this and neither have its competitors lol. 

So anyway, a couple of months back I was surfing Taobao and I saw Mi Band. Then I scrolled further and saw that it is now compatible with iPhone! So I got excited because a student like me could not afford anything from Fitbit and whatstheotherbrandcalled. For an average of $20, you can purchase Mi Band either from China or SG to track your sleep and number of steps taken each day. I got mine from Taobao because I can engrave my name for free hoho. 

Aesthetically speaking it is not as good looking as those more premium brands. The band itself cost maybe about $5 and you can choose other colours as well, which I cannot be bothered. I guess the key question is

Is it worth the purchase? 

To answer this question, I am using two apps from Apple - Sleep Time (which I blogged about before) and Argus. Argus is like Apple Health and it takes the data from various other of its apps like Sleep Time and display all your stats nicely for you. 

Disclaimer: I am NOT saying that Azumio, the company that develops Sleep Time and Argus is the gold standard. I am merely comparing Mi Band to it simply because I have been using them for quite some time and so I am more accustomed to their system.  

So as with how I tested Sleep Time, I too put the Mi Band on the table for a day (and subsequently a few more days because I was lazy/forgetful) and there was 0 data points for both sleeping and walking. Excellent. 

However this is where divergence occurs. 

As you can see from both the pictures, Mi Band and Sleep Time did not agree with each other as to my sleep quality. What is also not shown in the picture because it was too long, Sleep Time said that I slept for 5hr 52min on 27 Jan and 5h 44min on 28 Jan. In terms of the total hours of sleep, I supposed both are fairly similar (statistical test of significant required lol). I hypothesise that the differences maybe due to the location. Mi Band is on my hand and my phone is under my pillow. So maybe my head moves more than my arms? 

Next, walking. 

As you can see, Mi Band overestimated the number of steps I took each day. I later found out it was because of hand swinging. Even if I did not move and swung my arms instead, Mi Band will still record it as a step taken, whereas Argus would not. So in this aspect, I think Mi Band is not super accurate. It would not matter if the difference is about 100 steps, but this (below) is a fairly huge difference.  

So back to question.

To buy or not to buy? 

If you can tell from the pictures, there are already apps available for you to make use of. In fact both Samsung and Apple health apps are already able to track the number of steps you take. Perhaps the Mi Band is useful if you don't bring your phone around with you often.  Same goes for tracking of sleep. An important point I missed out is that MiBand is waterproof, so you can take it too the pools with you, but I am not sure how would it track 'steps' in this case then. 

So in my personally opinion, Mi Band is truly for the lazy or those who fear brain cancer from phone radiation. There is also the debate about whether do we need to know how much steps we walk each day? Surely we should start with the question 'have I exercise today' instead? 

If you have $20 to spare and you don't want to waste your phone battery on the apps, then get it. If not, I would really suggest the more premium wearables (that can track you heart rate) for those who are doing more sports.