There are many fitness apps for the iPhone but I use none of them. The reason is, I don't want to play with my iPhone while I'm at the gym, with the exception of occasionally looking for a particular song to play. This renders apps that allow you to track sets and reps for your workouts useless to me. I'm sure there are many people who feel the same way.
What if there was an app that could count your reps automatically. It could do this in a number of ways such as listening to your breathing, hearing for your grunts or possibly listening for the rep count under your breath "one, two, ..."
This idea isn't entirely hashed out but these fitness apps do need to automatically track you somehow in order for them to be widely used.
PS. Take a look at Fitbit or BodyBugg. These are cardio-oriented body-tracking systems that are on the right track.
5 comments:
I like this idea and like to expand on it.
Everything a users does throughout the day could be considered a workout. What if the app tracked everything a user did from walking up the stairs to taking the garbage out to actually working out.
Taking into account the user's entire day would yield a more exact cal burn results then just monitoring the workout.
True and like I said, there are products already on the market that attempt to do this. However, the technology is still very primitive. Fitbit only measures your steps and not activity and it does this with an accelerometer. I could see a device that you could say what you are doing and calculate calorie burn based on the accelerometer data it gathers.
Using the data location (gps) it could also know if you're at home, work or the gym. This is what could make the app auto-start.
Bodybugg measures skin temperature and salt concentration to see if you're sweating. Combined with intelligent GPS (biking vs riding in a car tracking) and other things like time of day, activity prior to and after current activity and a system that builds a profile of what you do during the day, statistical analysis could potentially very accurately calculate your caloric expenditure over the course of a day.
Could a developer write an app that utilizes the information collected by this proprietary dongle?
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