E.g. If you have to prepare for a marathon which is 2 months away, You make a schedule of running every morning. Now you run everyday and follow the same or different path. Sometimes you feel very tired and reduce the distance or sometimes you increase the distance, But you do not have track of whether your stamina or performance is increasing or not.
If you do your activity using the Pedometer, It will capture the details like distance covered each day, Steps taken and duration. You can review your performance after days and weeks to check whether it is improving or not. How accurate is the Count: It is close to the actual count but need to be started and stopped at right time.e.g. If you start the app before starting your jogging and end it after you complete it, then the count will be near to the actual count.
The answer is, It can provide a rough idea of it but not accurate numbers. Some of the tasks like picking up the phone ,putting it down, sliding it , holding it for clicking picture etc. may also increase the step count. Where you need to keep your phone: It does not matter where you keep it and you should keep it at a place where you are comfortable for free body movement. You can keep it in pocket,in jacket, hold it in hand or keep it in purse.
As long as it is directly or indirectly attached to your body during motion it will give the number of steps. Also it does not matter whether you keep your phone straight or upside down. Does it use GPS: These applications work without GPS also, So we can assume that it does not need GPS for step counting.
But if the application has other features like showing the map of the track you followed while jogging, then GPS will be required. These applications work with the phones which have the Accelerometer sensor built in it. While running, this application will monitor the change in accelerometer and based on it will conclude if the step is taken.
It can provide the information about the angle at which you are holding the device, direction , speed at which it is moved and the gravity. Accelerometer provides the values whenever they are changed along with the Time at which the event occurred. Application stores these values in the database and look for a pattern.
An accelerometer will provide three values x-axis value, y-axis value and z-axis value. Android Kit Kat 4.4 Step Detector and Step Counter(Developers Only Information): Android has introduced the low power step detector feature in the platform itself. Developers can use this feature and don’t have to write own code/algorithm for step detection. Apart from this a Step Counter is also introduced by the Android in Kit-Kat which will maintain the count of steps taken after the sensor is registered for listening of step events. 1:Extend the activity to implement SensorEventListener(). 2:Extend the activity to implement SensorEventListener().
Runtastic Pedometer: This is probably the best app available and works quite well. It captures relatively accurate step counts,have a great user interface and captures the summary of your activities well. Noom Walk Pedometer: The only advantage of this app is that it use less battery as compared to other apps. But it does not have the lot of rich features like measuring distance, Speed and duration and detailed summary for checking your performance. As per the App developer, It can be turned on for a complete day and will affect only 2% of battery.
I have not used it for whole day, But it is good for those who want to keep the pedometer on whole day without much impact on the battery. Accuracy of this app is not as good as Runtastic Pedometer. Pedometer 2.0:This app has good interface like Runtastic Pedometer. How to Check Sensitivity or Accuracy of Pedometer Apps: One simple test is to open the app on the phone, start the session using the button on the app.
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