About five years ago, when the first generation of wearable fitness trackers became popular, they were announced as the dawn of a revolution. Health experts and busniesspeople alike said that giving people access to real-time calorie (卡路里)- burning and step-count data would inspire them to lose weight, eat better and -most important- ____41____ more. But even as the U.S. market for ___42____ devices hits $7 billion this year, there’s evidence that their promise isn’t quite paying off.
The U.S. has an exercise problem, with 28% of Americans ages 50 and over considered wholly ___43____. That means 31 million adults move no more than is necessary to perform the most basic functions of daily life. Wearables, experts ___44___, were going to change that.
But limited academic research has been done to figure out whether wearables ____45____ people’s behavior in the long term. The little research that does exist isn’t ____46____. For a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers wanted to see whether activity trackers would help overweight people lose more weight over two years than if they just did a weight-loss intervention(干预) alone. They didn’t. “We found that just giving people a device doesn’t mean it’s going to ____47____ something you think it’s going to lead to,” says John Jakicic, the author of the study, from the University of Pittsburgh. “These activity trackers don’t engage people in strategies that make a ___48___ in terms of long-term change”
Another new study highlighted a different challenge: user ____49___. By the end of a yearlong study of 800 people, just 10% of participants were still wearing the trackers, according to, Eric Finkelstein, a professor at the Duke- NUS Medical School in Singapore. “We didn’t find that Fitbits really have much of an effect,” he says. This may well be because people expect trackers to do something they’re not designed to do-- ____50____, force them to change their behavior. “There’s ____51____ among people about their function, a measurement tool and an intervention,” Finkelstein says. A scale counts pounds, ____52____, but won’t teach you how to eat less. “When people put these devices on, they might interact with the app(应用程序) for the first few weeks, maybe the first few months, but there comes a point where that starts to fall off,” says Finkelstein.
To be ____53___, some of the costlier add higher-tech wearables have features baked into them that encourage users to move more, says Shelten Yuen, Fitbit’s vice president of research. Among them: shaking sensors, movement reminders and social- media combination, all designed to ____54____ users to make better health choices every day. But more research will be needed to determine whether or not these ____55____ -- or others like them--measurably improve people’s health and fitness levels.
41. A. learn B. purchase C. exercise D. perform
42. A. wearable B. electronic C. hi-tech D. built-in
43. A. misunderstood B. inactive C. discourage D. unchangeable
44. A. announced B. determined C. hoped D. noticed
45. A. limit B. understand C. interpret D. change
46. A. encouraging B. interesting C. pioneering D. challenging
47. A. benefit from B. result in C. add to D. look for
48. A. design B. movement C. profit D. difference
49. A. reduction B. participation C. creation D. expectation
50. A. namely B. therefore C. however D. shortly
51. A. argument B. popularity C. confusion D. interaction
52. A. by the way B. in other words C. of course D. for example
53. A. fair B. cute C. accessible D. technical
54. A. persuade B. motivate C. follow D. teach
55. A. concepts B. sensors C. scales D. features