Galaxy Watch 4’s health tracking looks to take Fitbit’s crown

Last year, Fitbit made the brilliantly timed decision to pivot away from focusing exclusively on fitness tracking, deciding instead to incorporate health analysis into the mix.

While the Fitbit Sense did add some noticeable features not previously seen on the market, Samsung’s Unpacked event has me thinking that the Galaxy Watch 4 could knock Fitbit off the top spot with ease.

If you’ve yet to see Samsung’s unveiling, then know that one of the key aspects of the Galaxy Watch 4 is its new BioActive sensor – which actually crams multiple sensors into a single unit. With this new sensor in tow, the Galaxy Watch 4 is powerful enough to run ECG tests, keep track of your blood oxygen as well as your blood pressure levels.

Already that’s an impressive bill, but nothing too extraordinary that the Fitbit Sense can’t keep up with. What’s really caught my attention is the fact that the Galaxy Watch 4 can now offer a metric known as Body Composition.

What this means is that the sensor can analyse your body fat, water levels, skeletal muscle and basal metabolic rate to give you a far more comprehensive understanding on your current bill of health.

For the last few months, I have been getting most of those statistics from a digital weight scale, but if Samsung has figured out a way to incorporate all of this technology successfully into a small wrist-worn wearable, then the Galaxy Watch 4 is a must-buy for me.

With its latest line of wearables, Fitbit put more of an emphasis on sweat and stress tracking which are impressive enough, but those features didn’t stop me from relying on other accessories to get a better overall picture. By comparison, Samsung may have just created a one-stop-shop, through which you can keep track of all the fundamentals of fitness.

Of course, we’ll have to wait until testing to see if the BioActive sensor can hold up as well as Samsung says it does, but this could be the perfect blend of smartwatch sensibilities and fitness tracking features that wearables fans have been waiting for. With Fitbit’s crown looking particularly wobbly at this point in time, it isn’t difficult to imagine the Galaxy Watch 4 also giving Apple a fair amount of grief down the line.