Pam Personal Activity Monitor

The Pam personal activity monitor records your physical activity and downloads it the internet to track your fitness activities, including steps and calories. The Pam is a useful gadget but its fatal flaw, in my opinion, is in relying on displaying Pam Points and not displaying steps on the Pam unit. This proprietary feature makes it difficult to compare your activity with those who use a pedometer. So unless all of your friends buy a Pam, it is lonely in Pam land.

The Pam uses an accelerometer to measure your motion and the intensity of that activity, rather than the raw steps logged by most pedometers. The Pam unit is a bit larger than most pedometers, measuring 2.3 x 1.7 inches, but it is very flat and comfortable to wear on your waistband all day.

The readout on the Pam unit is in Pam Points rather than in steps, distance, or calories. A Pam Point is a ratio of the amount of energy you use while active and the amount of energy you use while at rest, or activity calories vs. your base calories burned if you had no activity. The Pam site can advise on what target to set for Pam Points based on your age. For me, 35-50 points a day put me in the "Active" range.

The display can toggle between your daily Pam score (since midnight) and your weekly Pam score - the average of the last 7 days in memory. It also toggles the time of day. For feedback on your current exertion level, a series of bars shows your activity intensity for the past 60 seconds. The Pam uses a replaceable battery and comes with a security leash. It has a plastic clasp that is fairly secure.

The Pam waistband unit saves full data for 16 days, so you should upload every 16 days. If you fail to do so, it saves only the Pam daily scores for 112 days.

The Pam comes with a serial docking station. Plug in the station and register your Pam unit with the Pam web site, and download the driver software. You need an internet connection to upload your Pam data.

To upload, place the Pam in the docking unit while online and the information is uploaded and your Pam Online Coach is updated and displayed.

The Pam Coach page displays your Pam score and compares it to others in your age group as well as to your goal. You can toggle between your daily and weekly scores, and it graphs your scores over the past 2 weeks. It shows you how many activity minutes you have spent in the health zone and in the sports zone. This is nice data to have if you are trying to improve your exercise intensity. Your weight is also noted, although you must input that yourself. You can also enter activities that the Pam does not measure, such as bicycling, swimming, strength exercises, and "extra effort" in walking with a backpack or doing cardio fitness.

Click to the Pam Logbook and you can view any day in more detail, updating your weight, adding waist measurement, body fat, blood pressure, resting heart rate, fitness sensation, remarks, and three self-defined fields.

Select "View Your Graphs" to see your activity charts. You can choose to see the graph of any of the data entered in the Logbook, and change the scale from 3 weeks to 6 weeks to 2 months to a year. You can display Pam score, calories, steps, goal percentage, and averages. Hovering your mouse over any point will display the numerical value.

I found the steps logged by the Pam to be lower than the steps on my reference pedometers worn at the same time. The Pam edits out junk steps, but so does one of my reference pedometers, and it recorded 3000 fewer steps than my pedometers over a constantly-moving 6 mile walk.

The calories display is quite useful, especially estimating your

When you buy the Pam monitor, you get a free 2-year subscription to the online Pam Fitness Society, which you must have to upload your data. The regular cost is $99 per year. This is a good deal. Without the website, your Pam unit will still display your Pam score and weekly average.

Bottom Line The Pam was comfortable to wear, but the display of Pam Points without also displaying steps is frustrating. Unless you are part of a group that also talks in Pam Points, this is hard to translate to others. If steps were added to the unit display, I would be happier with it. I was mildly pleased with the Pam until I tested the SportBrain iStep, which is superior in every way in my opinion. The SportBrain displays steps, uploads with USB rather than a serial docking cradle, and its website produces much better display of the data, including graphing each exercise session as well as steps over the course of the day. I liked Pam. I love SportBrain iStep.