The Apple Watch was announced back in 2015 and one of the main things I can see for this device is the ability to use it for health and fitness. There are currently many different fitness monitors available FitBit, Garmin, and Moov Now name a few. The main complaint people seem to have with these is the lack of tracking the correct exercise. These devices know you’re moving, but they don’t really know what you’re doing. The Apple Watch may be the answer to solving that problem.
Apple Watch encourages you to move. It understands that being active during the day is part of your overall health and fitness. It counts daily non-workout activities like when you take the stairs or haul your groceries into your house in addition to tracking your gym activities. The Apple Watch also credits you for standing versus sitting during the day and also reminds you every hour to get up and move (which is something that I frequently need to be reminded of).
Every Monday, the Apple Watch can suggest a new daily goal based on your previous week’s activity of movements. The Activity app provides your day as a graphic, with an outer Move ring showing how many calories you’ve burned for the day. The new Workout app shows more details about your workout during specific activities which may be useful to adjust your workouts for maximum fitness gain.
The Activity app contains three rings that track your movement:
Move: Has the ability to set an activity goal for the day.
Exercise: Anything more than a fast walk is considered exercise. You can set to aim for 30 minutes per day all at once or throughout the day.
Stand: This function can reminding you to stand for 1 minute an hour for a 12 hour interval.
The Workout App also measures your cardio workouts, showing your goals, and keeping a detailed summary.
The Apple Watch uses a heart rate sensor, Wi-Fi and GPS signals, and its accelerometer to measure all of your movement.
This new device sounds like it will be very useful for people to use for health and fitness. I have a friend that is a biking enthusiast and he plans on using the device to set timed routines when he is biking to automatically prompt him to speed up or slow down alerting him by a vibration on his wrist. I can see that to be a good selling point for the device and it’s up to us developers to use this new hardware and create some fantastic software to go along with it.
I do like that Apple has given us one more platform to make some good money with our apps. What do you think, are you going to dive into developing apps for the Apple Watch? Leave your comments below.
