Amiigo: Wearable Tech Tracks Individual Exercises [Preview]
We are a big fan of crowd funding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. More accurately, we are a fan of a lot of the projects listed on these sites in need of crowd funding. Personally, I’ve backed six or seven projects and I’ve never been anything but satisfied. From time to time, a running or fitness project is listed that we can’t help but talk about and invest in.
A new project that is getting a lot of coverage is the Amiigo Fitness Bracelet. This project went live early last week on Indiegogo and has already hit its goal of $90,000. With that, this project is a go and right now is scheduled to be released this summer.
Amiigo is the latest entry in the crowded wearable tech field. Think FitBit, Nike+ Fuelband, and Jawbone Up. While all of those are pretty good at general measurements (steps taken, daily caloric burn, etc.) none of them can track individual exercises. The beauty of the Amiigo is that it can detect and understand each exercise, each rep in your fitness routine.
Consider your day at the gym: you’ve decided that you are going to swim 1000 yards, do a full body weight training routine, and finish it off with 3 miles on the treadmill. First, if you do all that, you are a stud. Second, the Amiigo can detect not only the fact that you’re swimming (including stroke type and number of laps) and running, but also recognizes each individual exercise in your fitness routine. It knows that you started with squats and did a total of 10 of them. It then picks up on the fact that you moved to bicep curls, and so on. It accomplishes all of this using a sophisticated gesture recognition system and some pretty powerful software.
One of the more unique benefits of the gesture recognition system is that it allows you to create your own exercises. Perhaps you do some sort of fancy TRX maneuver that no other human has ever done. The system can learn your maneuver, and when you do it again in the future, it understands what you are doing and tracks it.
Using Bluetooth 4.0, Amiigo will wirelessly sync with your iPhone or Android device allowing you to instantly share all of the details of your workout with your friends. Feel free to shame them with your awesomeness.
Although the device isn’t as pretty as the ones listed above–and it’s not a device you would wear all day–Amiigo’s functionality may simply be too good to pass up for fitness fanatics and analytics geeks alike. I’ll let you know if I get the opportunity to test out the device before its estimated ship time–and let you know if it lives up to the hype.
Amiigo starts at $99, but there are various options and prices depending on the color you want and the number of devices you want to purchase. the campaign ends on 28 February, 2013.
Indiegogo | Amiigo: Fitness Bracelet for iPhone and Android
Category: Cross Training, Gear, Running
I’m intrigued by this one… I think it sounds pretty cool!