Tag: fitness

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Connected Objects Fitness

LiftUp gives strength training a lift

Strength training is healthy, but it’s often time-consuming and typically requires people to join a gym, which can be costly and also inconvenient.

LiftUp is a smart home strength training product that uses connected resistance bands. It automatically tracks workouts and analyzes progress made on fitness goals. Users just select a workout and attach one or more resistance bands to work out. LiftUp comes with multiple, interchangeable band strengths. The resistance bands can be used to replicate any movement done with dumbbells, barbells and weight machines.

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Connected Objects Fitness

Skulpt Chisel helps body sculpting by monitoring fat

Having a device that can accurately measure one’s body fat can go a long way towards achieving fitness goals.

Skulpt Chisel is a device about the size of a typical smartphone that has 12 sensors on its back that can be used to measure 24 body muscles just by pressing it up against those muscles. It sends a tiny current past the subcutaneous fat and through the muscle fibers, picking up thousands of data points per second, according to its Indiegogo campaign. The technology then evaluates the flow of that current to accurately measure the fat percentage per muscle, and rate that muscle’s fitness.

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Smartwatches/Bands

Cogito Fit takes on geeky smartwatch competitors with style, simplicity and savings

Think wearables and the smartwatch inevitably springs to mind. With us firmly in the age of the Apple Watch, entrenched stalwarts like the Moto 360 and the Pebble are fighting to stay within the public eye through innovative offerings and novel form factors. All this going on doesn’t mean new ideas can’t spring up, though.

The Cogito Fit attempts to tack on a bit more functionality to a basic smartwatch without resorting to daily charging . Billing itself as the first fashion-forward connected watch on the market, the device not only looks good but also addresses a few limitations of high-end devices. Cogito offers a face with LED icons for basic notifications, straps in a few colors, and a bezel that can be swapped depending on preference.

Feature wise, the Cogito Fit functions like most other smartwatches in its notification capabilities, and when its done alerting someone to what e-mails, SMS, calls, and social media updates they have, a light activity tracker also tracks steps.

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Fitness

U-Liner will make you finer, offers exercise in a small package

People don’t exercise enough. That’s just a fact. Part of the reason is that most think they need expensive gym memberships or complicated fitness devices to get their workout on. That’s just not true.

The U-Liner delivers dynamic workouts in a small tear-shaped package. This device has the ability to work out the arms, legs, abs, back and more. It folds out in unique ways and provides resistance for strength building. Best of all, it doesn’t actually look like a fitness device, and blends in seamlessly with any home’s decor.

U-Liner is a lot like the Tao WellShell. However, Tao provides realtime feedback with the help of an accompanying app. The U-Liner team may want to consider such an addition going forward. Still the device is simple and clever, providing a bit of physical exertion anywhere. One U-Liner will cost backers a donation of $22 by June 2015. This little product has a funding goal of $5,000 on Indiegogo.

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Smartwatches/Bands Wearables

Swimmo smartwatch tracks pool performance, encourages strokes of genius

Perhaps the advent of the Apple Watch isn’t the be-all and end-all of smartwatches after all. At least until its app library fills out, there’s still room for specialized wristwear to make a splash.

patent-claimedEnter Swimmo, a smartwatch focused solely on the swimmer looking to increase strength and improve form. The OLED-equipped wearable is designed to be fully waterproof so as to work perfectly while tracking the length and intensity of each session. To do so, it captures everything from speed, distance, lap times, and heart rate, vibrating to alert users when to speed up or slow down in order to maintain a beneficial level of intensity to achieve set goals — all without having to interrupt the swim to take a look. The multilingual device uses  a patent-pending Rotate&Tap maneuver to keep things as streamlined as its users wish to be.

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Fitness Input Virtual Reality

Revisit your virtual stomping grounds and break a sweat with Stompz VR foot sensors

The promise of virtual reality is, at the same time, plagued with a number of real problems which can hinder the entire experience. The biggest problem yet to be solved involves how users can experience unlimited movement within very real, limited spaces. Because omni-directional treadmills and other wonky solutions aren’t ripe for the mainstream, reducing movement to controllers remains a necessary sacrifice.

patent-claimedStompz  is a product which allows VR enthusiasts to use their own two legs and avoid bumping into walls in the process. The product comes in the form of two sensors, each containing a nine-axis motion tracker, that attach to sneakers. Walking in place will map the same experience over to the virtual world, while walking slightly faster will translate into a run, providing a low intensity workout at the same time. The inputs themselves are fully customizable, so users have control over how to walk backwards, jump, sprint, etc. Stompz isn’t limited to the feet, though, as the motion trackers are versatile enough to be used with fitness equipment or as alternative controllers alá the Wii Nunchuks. Interested backers looking for a new way to use their headsets can shell out $125 for the Stompz kit, expected in December 2015. The campaign is looking for $100,000 in funding by April 10.

This product targets an extremely niche market of gamers looking to experiment with alternative forms of input when it comes to VR, something that is both very necessary but still a ways away from being successful. Products like Stompz and 3DRudder are the closest approximations to mainstream solutions currently available — and neither does a great job. Until a truly all-in-one solution comes along, these products will serve as testing beds until a product comes along and does it just right.

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Connected Objects Fitness

Smart Rope skips the gym, provides fitness and feedback in one sleek jumprope

Many people who work out require fancy gadgets, large equipment, or complicated machines to get the job done. They forget that fitness doesn’t have to be so complex and that a good workout can be had with one or two simple tools.

The Smart Rope takes one such humble tool, the jumprope, and ushers it into the 21st century. Smart Rope works with an accompanying smartphone app that tracks the number of jumps, calories burned, and the duration of each workout. It also lets users input their height, weight, and BMI so that the app can come up with the best training regimen for each individual user. Best of all, the rope itself comes equipped with LED lights that, when the rope is in use, displays to the user either the number of jumps made or calories burned.

While Smart Rope’s app isn’t the most sophisticated workout app on the market, it’s a great start for a product that plans to add many more features as funding comes in. Smart Rope doesn’t have the same portability as the very similar Sophia, but it does boast a much sleeker look. For their own, backers can donate $60 for delivery in September 2015. Smart Rope is hoping to raise $60,000 in funding on Kickstarter by April 6.

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Fitness Wearables

Stryd makes strides in measuring workout intensity

Most wearable fitness devices do a good job of measuring heart rate, pace and several other metrics. But they typically fail to gauge an extremely important metric for runners: workout intensity.

patent-claimedStryd was designed to accurately measure running power and efficiency while also offering most of the typical features that other fitness wearables and smartwatches provide. Stryd is a small clip-on device that users can attach to a piece of clothing during a workout. The device tracks data and uses Bluetooth Smart technology to subsequently connect with a wide variety of devices, including sports watches, smartphones (Android and iOS), tablets, and even computers. Notably, the device uses patent-pending sensing technologies developed by Princeton engineers. Each unit costs $149 and will ship in September. Its maker set a Kickstarter goal of reaching $50,000 by April 12.

Stryd holds a lot of promise for fitness enthusiasts, but there are far too many players in the fitness wearables market, including Tracky, to declare Stryd a sure thing.

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Health and Wellness

MachoMax makes working out easier to work in to your busy schedule

Working out is a great way to relieve the daily stresses of life while also retaining the ability to fit into one’s preferred clothing size.

For those times when the weather gets too cold or life gets so busy as to make getting to the gym impossible, MachoMax provides a convenient way for users to get a bit of a workout while staying warm and indoors. MachoMax provides resistance training and is reminiscent in appearance to Silly Putty. The product is specifically designed for improving endurance and speed. Conveniently, it comes in a disk shaped package that will most likely fit in any pocket, backpack, or purse.

The product boasts that it gives users the ability to work out anywhere, an ambitious claim given that a good full-body workout typically requires a healthy balance of cardio and weights. Still, MachoMax seemingly has potential and certainly offers users a convenient way to workout at a moment’s notice from the comfort of their own home. Interested backers might also like to check out Gym Handle and WilkWear.

The MachoMax campaign seeks to raise $15,000 by April 1, 2015. Early bird backers get one product for $15 with an expected delivery date of April 2015.

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Apparel Wearables

Tracky motion capture sportswear tracks whole body movements

Wearable fitness devices tend to be limited in what movements and physical activities they can track. Some exercise and fitness enthusiasts would no doubt be interested in smart sportswear that can accurately track all their movements and activities while they are working out.

Tracky motion capture sportswear from the Project Pole company in Bangalore, India, is designed to accomplish exactly that. It is made up of a compression T-shirt and compression pants that are armed with several sensors to record physical movements, along with heart rate, breathing rate and body temperature. The product contains as many as 11 motion sensors combined. Data collected includes biomechanical analysis and can be used for comparative study and performance evaluation. In addition to storing the data in the cloud, Tracky will inform users whether they are meeting set goals while exercising, and also provide tips on how to improve their fitness activities. The sensors transmit the data to a small hub unit that processes the data and then sends it to a mobile app for iOS and Android devices via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Windows support is also planned.

Tracky, like the similar Heddoko, holds promise for a very niche audience of fitness enthusiasts who won’t mind wearing a nearly full body suit while exercising. It’s also impossible to gauge how comfortable it will be from watching an online video—if it’s uncomfortable, there will likely be few takers.

Backers who provide $179 as part of an early bird special, or $199 as part of an Indiegogo special, can expect the product in September of this year. The latter price is 20 percent less than the expected retail price. Project Pole is hoping to raise $30,000 for the campaign by March 13.