I Taped a Fitbit to My Arm for a Week, and I Admit It's a Good Hack

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The beauty of a smart band is that it isn’t a watch and doesn’t need to act like one. That includes where you wear it: Whoop has the right idea with their bicep band and “any-wear” clothing. Since Google hasn’t released a bicep band for the Fitbit Air, some users are taking matters into their own hands—with rolls of tape. 

I’ve watched this trend unfold on the Fitbit Air subreddit, as one person after another realizes they can just tape the device to their arm, or anywhere they want. I’ve actually done something like this before—years ago, I found myself trying to fit the Whoop onto my ankle, and then thought, wait a sec, can’t I just tape it to the side of my leg? (I did, and it worked)—so I decided to give it a go again with a Fitbit Air. Here's how that went.

Why are people taping Fitbits to their arms (and what kind of tape works best)?

Taping your Fitbit Air to your arm (without the strap, of course) gets it off your wrist. It means the device is no longer in the way of wrist wraps or kettlebells, and you can wear any kind of sleeves or accessories you like without the Fitbit getting in the way or cramping your style.  These are minor problems, to be sure. But sometimes, it’s nice to just forget you’re wearing something. 

People are experimenting with different types of adhesives. One of the more popular is KT tape, the stuff that athletes often use to stabilize a body part that’s giving them some minor trouble. You can also use athletic or medical tape. But I don’t really trust any of those. I find that KT tape can start peeling off in just a day if you do a really sweaty workout and then take a shower. Maybe it’s not supposed to, but it can. Longer strips of tape have plenty of adhesive to keep them on, but a small piece—the size you’d need for a Fitbit—is going to have a harder time doing its job.

The best adhesive for the job is probably a CGM overpatch. CGMs, or continuous glucose monitors, are small plastic devices that are typically stuck on the back of the upper arm. A filament pierces the skin to take readings, but to keep it safely in place, the device itself has an adhesive. You can add some security by applying a large sticker called an overpatch. 

These overpatches are perfect for securing a Fitbit to your arm for long-term use. A typical CGM lasts about two weeks, and the Fitbit Air’s battery lasts about a week. If you want the device to stay on through workouts and showers, an overpatch is more than qualified to do the job. 

Does taping a Fitbit to your arm actually work?

While I’ve taped devices to my body before, I decided to do a proper experiment with the Fitbit Air. I applied it to the back of my arm with an overpatch (similar to this one) and went out for a run. It stuck well (despite the sweat), and captured heart rate data that matched well with other devices I used for comparison. Here's a video I made showing the process, and the results:

One risk of taping a Fitbit to your body is that not all areas of the body can capture heart rate equally well. The upper arm may not have great access to blood vessels on everyone’s body (we’re all different), but on the bright side, sticking it under a patch will keep it snug against your skin and block out ambient light, and those factors tend to improve accuracy. 

Activity detection may suffer, though: The Fitbit is judging your movement based on what it expects to see your wrist doing in a workout. Your upper arm won’t show the same movements as your wrist, so auto-detection might not work properly. When I took the taped Fitbit out on the road, it didn’t auto-detect my jog. On a second run, I started the workout manually, and things went better from there. 

How my week of Fitbit taping went

To start, if you think having a device taped to your arm sounds annoying, well, I often literally forgot I was wearing it. Several times during the week, I got a notification on my phone from the Google Health app congratulating me on a workout or critiquing how I slept. Every time, I thought: "Oh, right, I'm still wearing the Fitbit!" I have to admit this beats even the Oura ring as a set-it-and-forget-it tracker. Workout detection was admittedly not great, but it usually tracked something when I did a workout, even if it didn't get the correct start and end times. And I could certainly have manually stopped and started my workouts if I had wanted that level of accuracy.

Not everything about it was so convenient. There was one thing I was dreading, and that’s what would happen when I had to take it off. An overpatch often has adhesive so strong it’s hard to remove at the end of the two-week life of a CGM, and a Fitbit Air only lasts about a week before it needs to be charged. Normally, I'll just pop the Fitbit on a charger when I get a low battery notification, but I wasn't about to peel off the patch on a whim, so I waited through a day's worth of pestering from the app until it was shower time. By this point, the patch was peeling a little bit around the edges. If I'd needed to keep it on another week—like with an actual CGM—I'd just trim the edges and keep going. But my Fitbit was now nearly dead, so I had to take it off entirely.

A warm shower is the best place to remove something with strong adhesive. I got the patch off just fine, although I then faced the unexpected problem of what to do with the Fitbit. When you peel off a band-aid or a CGM, you just throw it in the trash; I had the Fitbit in the shower with me and had to find a place to carefully set it outside the shower without losing it.

Aside from that minor awkwardness, I was pretty happy with the whole experience. The Fitbit stayed out of my way, tracked my sleep and workouts at a basic level, and let me know 24 hours before it died so I could peel off the patch during my next shower. The biggest downside, besides dealing with the adhesive removal (from both my skin and the device), is the costs involed in applying patches every week, but perhaps that’s worth it if you really don’t like wearing a wristband.