Sunday, April 26, 2015

Future of fitness solutions, using senseables, not wearables

On fastcompany I found an interesting article about wearables and what they termed senseables, where our environment will adapt to personalize what we do with sensors.  One example was that as you go into the gym, the sensors will know who YOU are, and when you step on the treadmill it will know what your goals are, and what you have done before, and set the appropriate levels, perhaps taking into account your emotions.  Then, once you get done working out, your phone gets a menu of meals that will help you achieve your goals, taking into account the number of calories you had burned.

So I was pondering this, and I realized that we have the technology to build this now, but there are problems that this article had not discussed, that would come up when designing this solution.

The most challenging problem is about the menu, for two reasons:

  1. People do not make meals for themselves, but for a family, so the goals of each person and their exercise level should go into the menu.
  2. Many people have different dietary restrictions, such as paleo, food allergies, celiac disease as some examples.
So having one website that can come up with the menu will be a problem, so people should be able to pick from different sites, based on goals and dietary constraints.  But, if one person is paleo, another has food allergies, and you want to minimize shopping near the family, where should the menu be created?

This leads to some issues with privacy, as, would it make sense to require a user to have accounts on each food site, and then send their goals and calories? 

I believe the answer to this is No.  The phone, or one single server that is used with the mobile application should hold this sensitive information.

This leads to where the data should reside.  Though we don't tend to do it, with Androids, with iOS there is more infrastructure to allow people to have their Mac hold information, and the mobile devices share with that computer, which would be a better place to have this information.

The gym should have information about each person, so the workout can be customized based on goals and what has been done that day, and since the various electrical cardio machines are tied into the network at the gym then the personalization can go down to some of the equipment based on who the person is. 

In order for this to work we need to work more on having a larger collection of mobile websites and webservices that can be used by different applications, but, the current model for paying for applications won't work with this model, as that is you buy one application that works with their website.