It is New Years Day. Time for New Years resolutions. Almost everyone puts weight loss, health, and fitness on there list. I thought I would make a quick top five list of my favorite technologies in the area. As you might guess, it is full of gadgets, social analytics, and human cloud components.
First on my list is Daily Burn. While not perfect, Daily Burn represents the best system of record for personal health and fitness information.
First it has the integrated tracking of The Big Four: Food, Exercise, Weight, and Sleep. It is weaker on vital and medical information and its sleep tracking is brand new.
The most important component of a health app is data entry. Daily Burn does a good job here. The iPhone app is excellent with fast intuitive entry. It has integrated with Withings for automating weight and body fat data entry. It has integrated with Zeo for sleep data entry. It has a great crowd sourcing integration for ensuring the food and exercise databases are robust (key for fast data entry). It has a good barcode scanner as well, now a requirement for food trackers.
It has solid social features, with a friend system for peer support and a trainer community for expert advice.
The biggest drawback is data access and reporting. There is no API, so getting your data out or creating outbound integrations isn’t possible. It reminds me of the Facebook google contacts controversy….easy in, but no way out. Worse than the lack of API is the clumsy reporting. It is hard to do analysis and aggregate reporting. The options are poor and you can answer only the most basic questions.
Next to reporting, the next biggest issue is the challenge to accurate caloric burn tracking. Simply put, they need a fitbit integration.
Despite the drawbacks, dailyburn is an app I use multiple times a day, every day of the week.
The fitbit is s pedometer with style. I waiting for months for my fit bit to ship, but it was worth it. The fitbit provides me with a critical piece of missing data: how many calories I burn outside of workouts. Most apps just baseline your daily burn, but in reality, it varies dramatically (at least for me). Without the fitbit, I would have to be content with that blind spot. The fitbit uses a wii like accelerometer. The display is super cool (though mine went out a few days after I got the unit). Data entry isn’t too bad. Whenever I come close to my computer, the data is sucked out of the fitbit and into a web application. There isn’t an API or an iPhone app, but these guys are sharp, so I expect them to create a great experience outside of core caloric burn tracking.
The fitbit website has great usability, fantastic data analysis, including community benchmarking. On the social side, skillful weaving of game mechanics into the reporting is great for motivation and positive behavior reinforcement.
I desperately wish i had an automated solution for getting the fitbit data into daily burn, where my workout data is, but that isn’t too bad as a manual process.
The Withings wifi scale is one of the coolest toys I have ever bought. The scale is super high quality. The wifi support means that logging headaches are completely eliminated. The iPad app has perhaps the best weight visualization reporting of any app I have used. It does great trending and normalization. It allows me to see my weight and my lean muscle mass at the same time, side by side. It also does intelligent scaling on both the weight and time axes with pinch/zoom. Of course, the dailyburn integration seals the deal.
I didn’t get a Zeo until December, so my experience is limited. However, the Zeo has already earned a spot in my top five list. I’ve spent months with demotivating trial and error on environmental, diet, and scheduling tweaks to my sleep, trying to maximize physical and mental restoration while minimizing the time requirement. I had pretty much written off making meaningful improvements because my “data” was too subject. The Zeo provides great information and has allowed me to make more progress in a couple weeks than the entire rest of the year. For a few weeks prior to the Zeo, I had made some progress with my fitbit, but there isn’t a comparison in terms of the data collected or the accuracy between the two.
The Zeo syncs to dailyburn, which is great, but the lack of wifi, greatly increase the friction in the process.
Yes. Technically GetFriday isn’t a technology. That said, it is the human cloud equivalent of e Swiss army knife for personal health and fitness. GetFriday is one of the more progressive offshore personal assistant services. You buy subscriptions to a set number of hours of their team’s time. You have a point of contact, which operates as your institutional memory, but they can scale up with many people to complete tasks faster, or to complete them when your primary assistant is not available. Here are some of the ways I use GetFriday for health and fitness:
No fitbit integration to dailyburn? No problem. GetFriday and enter all the calorie burn deltas by reviewing the fitbit website and hand keying the data into dailyburn.
My food not in dailyburn’s impressive food database? Snap a picture of the nutrition label and email it to GetFriday to enter for you (also works great in conjunction with my personal chef service).
Not motivated enough to enter a complicated meal? Take a picture and have GetFriday figure it out.
Want to test drive a competing solution (like fitbit’s beautiful web UI)? GetFriday can keep the two in sync while you evaluate.
GetFriday researches health issues, finds and registers me for races, orders food, supplements, and other consumables.
Honorable Mention: The Four Hour Body
Fantastic book that mentioned almost every one of my five items.
