Wearable sensors like the Fitbit One and Jawbone UP are part of a growing new market of fitness monitors that track your steps, calories and sleep. The new Amiigo (due out this summer) doesn’t analyze sleep, but it does promise to deliver numerous other helpful tools for runners and athletes.
The Amiigo is a bracelet and tiny shoe clip that can automatically identify and track over 100 different activities including treadmill running, road running, elliptical training, swimming and biking. It can even tell if you’re lifting weights, counting your reps and sets and tracking your improvement.
“Essentially, each exercise movement has a signature,” said Amiigo creators David Scott and Abe Carter. “When a user performs a movement, the system takes a look at that "signature" and scans the database to find a match. One of the coolest features about the system is that if a user performs a unique movement, they can record and label the movement. So the next time they perform that unique activity, the system will identify and record it.”
The Amiigo records your speed, duration, intensity, calories burned, external skin temperature, blood oxygen level and heart rate (with no external chest strap). When you’re finished working out you can wirelessly upload the data to the Amiigo smartphone app using Bluetooth 4.0. You can then share your activities and compete with friends.
The Amiigo launched on the crowd raising site Indiegogo two weeks ago, and the company has already raised more than twice it’s initial goal of $90,000. The bands are due to arrive in June, just in time for the summer training season.
Priced very competitively at $99 for a black band and $119 for blue or green, the Amiigo should be an extremely popular addition to the fitness monitor market, especially if all of the new features prove functional and accurate.
Comments