A little over a month ago, I bought a new copy of Pokemon HeartGold. Those of you who know the game will also know that it comes with a little pedometer that gives you small benefits within the game. I figured I had room for it in my pockets, so I’ve been keeping it on me ever since.

        One thing that’s interesting is that it seems to break up steps into discrete “trips”, separating them after some unknown period of low activity. It’s a feature I wouldn’t know I wanted, if I were shopping around for a “real” pedometer. While it’s not perfect (there’s some required threshold for generating a “trip” report, like having 15+ minutes of walking), it winds up giving me a lot of really interesting information. Assuming I remember what I did on a given day. But, for example, the first day I had it, I walked to school in the morning and after class. When I had to stop at a couple of traffic lights on the way to/from campus, it separated the trip into chunks - so I can figure out the relative distances of each part of the trip (from hose to the first major intersection, from there to campus). Well, that assumes I write down the trip numbers at the moment I transfer them to the game cartridge (more on that in a moment). Also, I say relative because I don’t know exactly how long my stride is, and I can’t claim 100% accuracy of its measurements.

        When I walked both to and from campus, my totals were in the range of ~12,000-15,000 steps. If I walk in the morning and take the bus in the afternoon, it’s down to ~9,000-12,000. After construction finally finished on a bridge near campus, I was able to cut my travel time hugely by taking the bus halfway and walking from the bridge. This put me down around ~7,000-11,000 steps per day. However, that’s all from my mom’s house - from my dad’s, I’m around 6,000-8,000 most days.

        However, the main issue thus far has been that I don’t have access to complete historical data. Data for the last seven days is stored on the device itself, and can be “sent” to the game cartridge for summarizing and getting bonuses. When you sent the information to the cartridge, it gives you your trip reports and updates your total steps thus far. But it doesn’t store the individual daily values that are sent to it (since that could take theoretically infinite storage, which it doesn’t have). So this leaves me with the annoying problem of writing down my daily steps just before bed, and that feels like a lot of effort.

        Interestingly enough, the Nintendo 3DS includes pedometer functionality, and seems to keep track of historical data (hourly summaries and daily summaries) indefinitely on a calendar. From my own use, it seems to count less steps in most cases - but perhaps the Pokemon pedometer is counting too many… I’m inclined towards the former because of the size of the 3DS. I imagine it’s harder for the whole thing to shake and count as a step. That, and it’s just not something I can fit in the pocket of my pants, so it’s not a real alternative. I keep it in my backpack, instead, but that counts far less steps.

If only the 3DS could connect and sync steps with the Pokemon pedometer…

A few specific things I learned in the first few days:

• In the morning, walking to campus from mom’s takes me about 3000-4000 steps
• Going from the lab on one side of campus to my locker takes about 2000-3000 steps, which makes me realize just how much I need to minimize my trips there

        Anyway, it’s been somewhat interesting. The data would be more interesting if I put in more effort, though. I imagine there are super amazing pedometers that would automate most of the drudgery, but those would cost money. I don’t want to go for a phone-based option, either, because the phone’s built-in sensors just aren’t a good alternative to the simpler solution of a pedometer. Reading reviews for Android step counting apps, people report terrible battery drain and a variety of limitations (have to keep the app in the foreground) and I’m not terribly surprised. But, I guess, without spending some real money on something like this I probably wouldn’t get anything better than what I already have (fits in pocket, counts steps for a given day).

Ah, well. Perhaps that’s a Christmas present idea.