Apps  

There are apps for everything nowadays, including great ones that will help you get healthier.  Here are a few examples of apps to help you set personal healthcare goals, stay motivated, and exercise more efficiently.

As people acquire mobile devices, they become more in tune with the power of apps. There are apps to help them manage their daily schedule, their finances, augment their entertainment needs and even help to improve their overall health and well-being. People today belong to a totally app driven society. Since apps have had such a positive benefit to people's personalized health goals, let's take a look at six trending health apps that people use to push themselves towards a healthier lifestyle.

Runtastic Six Pack Abs App

If you know anything about working out your core and developing solid abs, it can be a lot of hard work. The Runtastic Six Pack Abs app takes all the guess work out of how to approach getting the results you seek. With video tutorials that operate in slow motion, even someone the needs help will be able to follow what is going on with this app. After using this app for some time, there will be no denying the awesome six pack you will be sporting.

Fit Star Personal Trainer App

Backed by the professional insights and training expertise of former NFL star, Tony Gonzalez, the Fit Star Personal Trainer app is your affordable way to a pocket sized personal trainer for all your workouts. At the end of each workout, the Fit Star Personal Trainer app interrogates the user to determine how to develop the users next workout. This app will keep you in shape, with the right amount of challenges to your workout, without pushing you too hard to get the results you want to see.

Fitmo App

If you would like the direction and insights of a personal trainer, but can not swing a trainer and a gym membership, then Fitmo may be an affordable alternative. With the Fitmo app, you will be able to get feedback from a personal trainer through your mobile device for only 40-dollars each month. Not only will your personal trainer make workout recommendations, but they will also provide you with meal recommendations and check in with you through text messages to assess your progress. It is like having a personal trainer, working with you on your own time, for a fraction of the usual cost.

BabyBump Pregnancy Pro App

The BabyBump Pregnancy Pro is a great app to have if you are expecting. It is packed with information and tips to help with all nine months of your pregnancy. You can keep track of your progress, start countdowns, track your weight and more. It's a great place to keep all the details and notes about your pregnancy to share with your doctor as well. “No app should replace your doctor visits, however, and it's important to see your physician regularly,” says Dr. Gilbert Webb.

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NIKE+ Training Club App

If you are looking for variety in your workouts, then look no further than the NIKE+ Training App. This app provides users with excellent, professional grade video tutorials to help keep even a newbie on track with their personalized fitness program. With over 100 different pre-generated workouts to choose from, each user will be able to customize their workout to meet their own personal fitness goals. Now you can get that mean, lean looking body with the help of this popular fitness app.

Healthcare Alert App

Created by a physician from Hawaii, the Healthcare Alert App was designed to help people stay on top of doctor visits. Aside from making sure you remember your regular checkups, Healthcare Alert also reminds users of preventative medical screenings and updates them when it is time to go in for bloodwork. This app is particularly helpful for people who have a tendency to forget their appointments and need a general reminder.

With your mobile device in hand, it is now easier than ever to command a healthy lifestyle. From achieving specific workout goals to reaching your doctor appointments on time, health and fitness apps designed for your mobile device have your health covered in more ways than one. In essence, there is just about an app for any aspect of your personal healthcare you can imagine.

By Anita Ginsburg

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Author Bio - Anita Ginsburg is a freelance writer from Denver, CO and often writes about business, finance, education and home. She graduated from Colorado State University in 2004. A mother of two, she enjoys traveling with her family when she isn’t writing.

 Interfaces  

Researchers have developed a new app enabling users to operate their smartphone with gestures. This development expands the range of potential interactions with such devices.

It does seem slightly odd at first: you hold the phone in one hand, and move the other in the air above its built-in camera making gestures that resemble sign language.

Sometimes you move your index finger to the left, sometimes to the right. You can spread out your fingers, or imitate a pair of pliers or the firing of a pistol. These gestures are not, however, intended for communicating with deaf people; they are for controlling your smartphone.

"While touch input works well for many scenarios, we demonstrate numerous interaction tasks such as mode switches, application and task management, menu selection and certain types of navigation, where such input can be either complemented or better served by in-air gestures."

By mimicking the firing of a pistol, for example, a user can switch to another browser tab, change the map’s view from satellite to standard, or shoot down enemy planes in a game. Spreading out your fingers magnifies a section of a map or scrolls the page of a book forwards.

All this gesturing wizardry is made possible by a new type of algorithm developed by Jie Song, a Master’s student in the working group headed by by Otmar Hilliges, Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. The researchers presented the app to an audience of industry professionals at the UIST Symposium in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The program uses the smartphone’s built-in camera to register its environment. It does not evaluate depth or color. The information it does register – the shape of the gesture, the parts of the hand – is reduced to a simple outline that is classified according to stored gestures. The program then executes the command associated with the gesture it observes. The program also recognizes the hand’s distance from the camera and warns the user when the hand is either too close or too far away.  It works like making the smartphone a Kinect Sensor.

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“Many movement-recognition programs need plenty of processor and memory power”, explains Hilliges, adding that their new algorithm uses a far smaller portion of computer memory and is thus ideal for smartphones. He believes the application is the first of its kind that can run on a smartphone. The app’s minimal processing footprint means it could also run on smart watches or in augmented-reality glasses.

"Our goal is not to replace the touchscreen as primary input device, but rather to augment and enrich the existing interaction vocabulary using gestures," claim the researchers. "While touch input works well for many scenarios, we demonstrate numerous interaction tasks such as mode switches, application and task management, menu selection and certain types of navigation, where such input can be either complemented or better served by in-air gestures."

The program currently recognizes six different gestures and executes their corresponding commands. Although the researchers have tested 16 outlines, this is not the app’s theoretical limit. What matters is that gestures generate unambiguous outlines. Gestures that resemble others are not suitable for this application. “To expand its functionality, we’re going to add further classification schemes to the program,” says the researcher.

He is convinced that this new way of operating smartphones greatly increases the range of interactivity. The researcher’s objective is to keep the gestures as simple as possible, so that users can operate their smartphone effortlessly.

But will smartphone users want to adapt to this new style of interaction? Hilliges is confident they will. Gesture control will not replace touchscreen control, but supplement it. “People got used to operating computer games with their movements.” Touchscreens, Hilliges reminds us, also required a very long adjustment period before making a big impact in consumers’ lives. He is therefore certain that this application – or at least parts of it – will find its way onto the market.




SOURCE  ETH Zurich

By 33rd Square

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