Latest hype about healthcare tech has been more than wearable fitness trackers, but an arguably much more impactful way to be healthful and shed fat is to track eating habits, something you can already do with a smartphone alone. MyFitnessPal, one of the initial mobile apps to track foods intake, is set to broaden its support to track activity too, marking a direct challenge to the software supplied by wearable products like Fitbit and Jawbone and an attempt to produce 1 of the first, complete windows into a person’s health.
MyFitnessPal says it will track fitness action via a feature referred to as Actions, and while the attribute will sync with information that comes in from wearable products like the Fitbit and Jawbone UP, it will also track steps directly by means of the iPhone 5S. The app is taking advantage of the phone’s M7 chip, which is powerful and effective adequate to continuously track action without having draining the phone’s battery.
MyFitnessPal’s founder and CEO Mike Lee, who wears a black Fitbit Flex on his wrist, hopes to make activity monitoring on his app operate with other smartphones too. He notes the obvious overlap of his app with Fitbit’s, which also tracks nutrition intake, but adds that “a good deal of people favor ours. Our consumers want to be capable to see all that information inside of our app.”
Lee has spent the final final 9 years creating up an huge sum of data based on what his much more-than 50 million registered customers contribute to the app. “We have the largest database that is ever existed of what men and women eat,” says Lee. “There’s never ever been one thing like this.”
Well being care companies and researchers have naturally come knocking at his door in a bid to gain accessibility to that data, but Lee claims to be “very protective” of it and is holding back for now. Whilst other fitness apps have open APIs for information sharing, MyFitnessPal’s is private and demands a formal partnership for that data to be unlocked.
There is an argument that as smartphones develop far more sophisticated sensors like the Samsung Galaxy S5’s finger-print sensor and heart price check, they’ll send wearable fitness trackers like the Fitbit towards obsolescence. Smartphones did the identical for in-auto navigation, following all, following the short-lived reputation of TomToms and Garmins.
Lee says it’s as well early to make a bet on form factors both way, since men and women really do not often have their phones on their bodies, and wearables have the advantage of sensors that could, more and more, measure issues like heartbeat and sweat articles at all occasions.
“The sum of information you have available to you is going to grow exponentially,” he adds. “What’s fascinating is what you can do with that data in the long term.”
Over time, Lee hopes to find a spot for his support in the healthcare area. Fitness apps and wearable units usually fit into the so-called consumerization of well being care trend, exactly where providers hope to consider a bite out of the $ two.3 trillion overall health care industry and shell out a position in that prolonged span of time amongst doctor’s visits.
Lee sees his support as an “incredibly powerful” way to bridge the data gap among consumers and their overall health care companies. A future services that ties in with healthcare “would have to be permission primarily based,” he adds, but such functions are already being mapped out and MyFitnessPal has an API that allows users to connect to specific healthcare suppliers. “We’d be interested in including a health-related companion,” he says.
That could be 1 likely route to creating money. For now, MyFitnessPal derives revenue totally from marketing ad room on its app with the help of mobile ad networks. The startup, which was bootstrapped for most of its existence till an $ 18 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins last year, was actually profitable for a even though, Lee says. Nonetheless investments in hiring for roles like data science to boost its analytics offerings, have pushed it into the red more not too long ago.
Lee began MyFitnessPal nine years ago as a desktop app when he and his then-fiancee were striving to shed a few pounds ahead of their beach wedding ceremony. When his trainer told him to start counting his calories on paper, Lee created a world wide web application that permitted him to do it on a personal computer alternatively. The services grew to become an iPhone app in early 2009.
These days it’s 1 of many cost-free, excess weight-reduction apps that have challenged paid-for dieting stalwarts like Jenny Craig and Fat Watchers, the two of whom have suffered share drops in excess of the last year or so as a result.
A lot of of these cost-free apps, like MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper and Runtastic, cross reference information with 1 an additional via open APIs to support them scale up. More than time however, some might select to quit sharing data in a bid to create single platforms that end users go to for a holistic see of their overall health and activity. This looks to be the street MyFitnessPal is going down with its private API and now, the inclusion of steps tracking.
The app’s announcement is also interestingly timed, coming a day right after Facebook unveiled the new behind-the-scenes network that connects mobile apps by means of a user’s Facebook ID. With it, users will soon be in a position to log into apps “anonymously.”
The thought is that this will motivate more people to use Facebook as an identifier amongst third-celebration providers.
For an app like MyFitnessPal which may at some point partner up with healthcare providers, a ubiquitous ID program like Facebook’s could make that simpler. But Facebook and MyFitnessPal will want to obtain scale, and far more importantly the believe in, of users to consider that following stage.
MyFitnessPal Starts Tracking Methods To Expand The World"s Biggest Nutrition Database
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