IAmKat's posterous

Imagine you’re sitting down to eat, but before you take a bite, you whip out your smartphone, fire up a special app, and take a picture of your food. The app identifies the food types by appearance, then calculates the size of your portions, and estimates your intake of calories, carbs, protein, vitamin, mineral, sugar, salt, and so on. Later you can review your data in a variety of ways. You can see your calorie intake for the day, or compare yourself to other people who are your same age, size, activity level, and so on.

At the end of a meal, if you have some food left, you can snap another picture so the app can calculate the net of what you actually ate.

If it seems impossible that an app could recognize food types, consider that software can already recognize faces, voices, specific songs, and fingerprints. Recognizing broccoli can’t be that much harder. And anything that has a label or a wrapper, such as Diet Coke or a Snickers candy bar, would be relatively easy for the app to identify.

Soups and casseroles would be harder to identify and analyze. The app might ask you to supply some information on the main components of the dish.  If you said it was a casserole with potato, chicken, and garlic, the app would know that garlic is a minor ingredient and potato is the main ingredient. It might even look at similar recipes in its database and take an average.

The app would not be perfect at estimating, even with your frequent tweaks. But it would be far better than your own guessing.  And it would be great at telling you where your diet is lacking. You might think you have a good diet, only to discover that you aren’t getting enough variety of fruits and veggies.

Now imagine that an accessory for this app is a small waterproof motion detector that you can clip to your footwear. It comes with a watch that also has motion detection. When your smartphone is nearby, the two motion detectors wirelessly download how much movement your arms and legs have experienced that day.  That would be a rough proxy for exercise. You would have to add any data for weight training because that doesn’t require much movement.

Now your app has your total nutrition and exercise profile. You could round out its knowledge by telling it your age, weight, gender, whether you smoke, and other relevant health questions. From that point on your app could predict your life expectancy and even your odds of dying from specific types of preventable diseases. Perhaps your watch could display both the current time and how many days you have left if you keep living the way you are.

Two factors that most influence human behavior are the ability to measure progress and the framework used to rank performance. This app solves both problems. Allow me to expand on this.

I’ve noticed that losers compare themselves to the average of other people, whereas winners compare themselves to their own natural potential. The loser can find comfort in knowing there are plenty of other slackers, and he is average (good enough) among them. The winner compares his progress to his personal potential and doesn’t stop until he achieves it.

Researchers have found that simply being near overweight people has a large influence on your own weight. This is probably a result of looking around and deciding that eating a little extra is normal, and good enough. The app I described would change your point of reference by continually reinforcing your own potential.  In time, your frame of reference would be less about your chubby friends and more about how you are doing compared to your own best, as measured by your app.

In your opinion, this app is…

1.       Inevitable?

2.       Already available?

3.       Impossible?

4.       Impractical?

Check out this video on YouTube:

Now imagine that each machine is networked to a server. Everyone in the gym works as a team, with their actions becoming the inputs for a wall-sized video game. Each gym would have a captain, and you'd play via the Internet against other gyms. The poundage you move on your machine might be, for example, adding speed or ammunition to the captain's guns, or making your team's avatar faster or more protected in some way. You can imagine a million game types in which the gym equipment's movements can feed into the action. The simplest game would be a Viking rowing boat, or dog sled, racing against another gym, or multiple gyms. The most complicated would be some sort of combat game where your vehicle's speed, shields, and weapons power are determined by the output of the exercisers.

You'd need strict supervision to make sure no one was so amped up by the game that he hurt himself on the machines. And the captain would need to coordinate when someone moved from one machine to another. For example, if you were being attacked and needed stronger shields, you might move your most buff teammate to the machine controlling shield power until the threat was over. If speed was most important, you'd put your speedsters on the treadmill. Or maybe at some point everyone would have to "lift" at the same time to get over an obstacle. The variations are limitless.

I wouldn't include free weights in this business model, just because it would get dangerous if people started rushing.

In the beginning of this business model, people would show up whenever they wanted and join games in progress. Later on, I can imagine captains recruiting stronger and faster players and forming leagues.

People will exercise harder if they are part of a team effort. And video games are so engaging that the time would fly.  If you have bad knees, or you can't run for any other reason, you can still be completely competitive in this team sport.  For guys who grew up playing team sports, that could be a big appeal.

Obviously this sort of gym wouldn't be for everyone. Perhaps during certain times of day, such as morning, the video game would be turned off, but the sensors would keep a running total of the poundage you are moving that day and compare it to your personal history. The theory is that you would keep working out until you reached or exceeded your daily average poundage no matter what mix of equipment you used to get there.  That would encourage you to diversify your workout without the need to keep track of your progress on every individual machine. Maybe it's just me, but I don't like to combine math with exercise.

My point is that gym equipment is dumb. But it won't stay that way.

From: "Stuart Brass" <stu@soulsports.co.uk>
Date: 8 September 2010 11:42:25 GMT+01:00
To: "Stuart Brass" <stu@soulsports.co.uk>
Cc: "Spencer Claridge" <spencer@soulsports.co.uk>, "Joanne Brown" <joanne@soulsports.co.uk>
Subject: British Snow Tour - Loads of Changes

Hello Snowboarders & Skiers

Just a quick one to let you know about the first event of the British Snow Tour this weekend and also about all the changes we’ve made to the Tour…

1/ New National Champs Comp format (3 runs best 1 counts)

2/ New additional Jam competition (free with the National Champs)

3/ New younger age groups

4/ £Entry Offers (3 disciplines for the price of 2 at Norwich & 3 indoor entries for price of 2)

5/ New Seeded riders

6/ New Ranking lists (UK & Global)

7/ No snowboard license fee

8/ Registration on the day results in a £5 donation to GB Teams (so pre-register, pay on the day though)

9/ More events added to the tour, initially in the form of the Scottish series but more to follow

10/ New sponsors & media partners

11/ New BST Rider rep (Kat Miller)

12/ Dedicated BST Park Designer & Shaper (Damian Doyle)

13/ A regularly updated www.facebook.com/snowtour website

And lastly our new website… www.britishsnowtour.com

Hopefully we’ll see you there, and don’t forget to pre-register if you are competing, if doesn’t cost you anything but it’ll save you a fiver

Regards

Stu