The following is an op-ed by Gaurav Mathur, who was diagnosed pre-diabetic a few years back and since then has been passionate about using technology to enable health and wellness. He is the founder and CEO of Electric Sheep, a young startup building Astro, a product aimed at using technology to improve personal health & fitness. He is a serial entrepreneur and sold his first startup to Motorola/Google, prior to which he worked at Google during Android’s early days to help bring about the current wave of mobile. In his spare time, he enjoys anything that takes him outdoors – hiking, cycling or running.
We have a population fascinated with tracking their digital selves, but the number of people afflicted by obesity and unhealthiness is steadily increasing. BBC notes that “over 50% of the world’s population is not of a ‘healthy weight,’ according to (Professor Tim) Benton’s recent report on food production. And worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980.”
It’s more important than ever to go beyond simply buying a Fitbit or Apple watch, to actually invest in yourself and hold yourself accountable towards your goals and picking a workout companion can play a big role towards these.
We wrote a piece about communication playing a key role in an effective workout strategy. Some of the take-aways are that it needs to be both personalized and customized to the individual, while also staying consistent — areas that a companion can help.
Artificial intelligence is all the buzz these days. It is being used in a variety of domains – ranging from unlocking new efficiencies in farming (FarmView), making driverless cars (Waymo, Tesla) and allowing us to simply talk to machines (like Siri).
What if this technology was brought to personal health and fitness to watch over your personal nutrition and fitness? It would provide feedback and recommendations without judgement, give you the same advice as an expert nutritionist and trainer and be available 24/7 on your schedule.
Crunches with Siri?
FitBodyHQ claims that getting a workout buddy is “one of the smartest moves you can make.” Communication at an interactive level is what’s most engaging and supportive. Partnering up also increases your commitment to the workout immensely, as you have someone holding you accountable and giving consistent critique and or feedback. It is also a great opportunity to find out what you are doing right (and wrong) as well as get micro-feedback on current nutrition and workout habits.
Siri and Google assistant are both remarkable products offering a simple virtual assistant that can make looking up directions, adding to-dos and finding information a breeze. Interactive speech, listening and hearing is the most natural form of human communication. Technology that mimics human behaviour has the shortest learning curve making it sticky and its adoption easy.
This technology could also give you a virtual workout buddy, one that you could simply talk to much like Siri and Google. This can take the fitness tracking and workout buddy game to a whole new level. Not only does it make it simple to receive micro feedback about your nutrition and workout habits, the ability to communicate conversationally actually expedites information flow.
Imagine instead of having to track your meals one by one in a calorie-counting app like MyFitnessPal, you could simply tell this fitness Siri, “I had my usual breakfast and lasagna for lunch today,” or even better just snap a picture of your meals.
You normally meet your buddy, nutritionist or trainer a few times a week at a certain place. The digital buddy would give you access to the expertise of a nutritionist and trainer at your fingertips and on your schedule 24/7. It could offer a truly ambient experience to you across your entire digital footprint, ranging from smart watches through living room devices like the Amazon Echo.
The convenience, access to expertise and expediency is simply unparallelled.
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Make your data work harder for you.
Digital fitness so far has been focused on collecting data and this is often a key component of a successful fitness, health or nutrition plan. Oftentimes, you have to count steps, log your physical activity from the day and enter calories consumed all in apps or a good old fashioned logbook to track your progress.
Artificial intelligence allows us to analyze the data you’re keeping up with on a daily basis and provides conclusions and solutions customized to your plan. For example, you’ll know at a glance what workout you should do and what meal you should eat day to day in order to stay on track. Not only that it can help answer the types of questions people often muse about on a fitness or nutrition plan: If you walked 5,000 steps – does that mean you’ve earned a burger for dinner? Can you eat that and still reach your goals? How was the week overall – did I make good progress towards my fitness goal, or did I regress? The answer is hidden in all that data and your digital workout buddy’s job would be to sift it for these insights.
The best of both worlds?
Your Artificial Intelligence (or AI) buddy could offer you the power of an expert nutritionist and trainer that is constantly learning and become better at its job. This could offer you a great companion for your fitness journey regardless of your goal, helping you easily track what you are doing, analyze it and figure out how to get to your goal. And those same qualities that make working out with a partner so effective can now be easily accessed anytime and anywhere at a fraction of the cost.
At the same time, it is unlikely that your digital buddy will replace your favorite trainer at the gym anytime soon. Digital buddies are still pretty far from being human, and at understanding complex situations such as impact of medical conditions and ultimately in providing the “human touch”. They are constantly improving though, and can provide the perfect complement by being available for you at the press of a home-screen button and helping you execute and stick to a prearranged plan.
For those of us who have never worked with a personal trainer or nutritionist and do not want to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars, digital buddies can be a game changer.
Imagine how efficient workouts will be when instead of scheduling a time to meet with your trainer, you log onto your app and are greeted anytime of day or night by your digital partner? Or you can simply talk to your buddy about your nutrition and workout plan for the day each morning on your way to work.
This is certainly how digital fitness will evolve – your next nutritionist, trainer or workout buddy might very well be a digital artificial intelligence.