Health and fitness apps are the killer category in the wearables market; their growth is increasing 62% faster than the rest of the app industry.
One in five Americans owns a wearable. FitBit and Apple are clamoring over each other to take the lead in this game but no one seems to have cracked the code. One reason for the shortfall may be that much wearable data isn’t actually actionable. Sure people love getting their calorie counts and metrics for their sleep patterns, but then what do they do with them?
It’s not that the data is misguided or even misrepresented, but rather, while it’s good to have, it totally misses the point: it doesn’t create a direct path to improving your life and impacting your health in a positive way. Especially if you have more than one wearable – how do you consolidate and effectively reconcile all the information? The point is not to just see it, but do something about it.
An Actionable Automated Approach to Health Data
Corevity is a new technology company just launched in March and they are trying to tackle the issue of integrating, visualizing and making actionable all the performance and health metrics from all your wearables.
Corevity Founder, Patrick Connelly walked me through his personal but familiar journey prior to founding the company:
“I am a high intensity person. I played college sports, so I have always been an active guy. When I was 22 I was training six days a week, I was extremely fit. After college, I developed high blood pressure (140/100) and had a clear lack of health input knowledge (my favorite food was sandwiches). I was totally freaked out about taking a pill to regulate my blood pressure for the rest of my life so I began reshaping my personal health inputs.”
Over a 10-year period Patrick manually tested his nutrition inputs, over and over and over again. He needed to keep his energy levels high so he could continue to be active, but lower his blood pressure. He moved away from processed foods to whole foods (mostly meat and veggies) and now eats mostly organic foods that he buys weekly at his local market in San Francisco (lots of vegetables, little meat).
Patrick continues,
“Even over that 10-year time period, there was still no barometer or feedback system. It was all trial and error for me. I wanted to understand my health inputs and outputs, so I set out to find a way to understand my health in an actionable, direct way.”
As a result, he created Corevity, an automated health technology platform designed to understand your lifestyle. Corevity has zeroed in on what they believe to be the most important health factors in our lives: sleep, activity, and nutrition.
They automatically track this data for you and remind you what you might be missing. On top of that, Corevity has added a proprietary health graph; a dashboard, with the help of a real-time personalized health score, that aggregates the aforementioned health inputs and correlates them to further understand of how certain inputs shape our health. Their first product, the Corevity App, will launch in the Apple App Store in the coming weeks. You can join their invite list on their website.
Patrick further explains what makes the Corevity app so easy to use habitually:
“Once you sign up, as long as you have your phone in your pocket, it tracks your health in easy actionable ways, without buying any additional hardware. This app syncs with all of your existing health apps that track sleep and exercise, and is automated to know your nutrition inputs so you don’t have to track what you eat. In fact, it collects all of your nutrition and food consumption through your debit or credit card transaction data. It is designed to be simple and easy to use. Understanding your health should be easy. We see the app as just the start in our health technology toolkit.”
The Corevity Use-Case
“Imagine a busy young professional or an older C-Suite executive,” Patrick says. “They both want to be healthy and fit, but have no extra time or inclination to input their personal and fitness data into yet another device. Like adding their meals after they eat…forget about it! Life’s too short! So we found an automated way to add their nutrition data. The same goes for syncing with their existing health and fitness platforms. They don’t need to replace wonderful communities like Fitbit, Strava or MapMyFitness – Corevity pulls all of that data in automatically and gives them an easy way to understand their health score. Corevity works with their existing health and fitness trackers to enhance their health understanding with automated health scoring.”
Living Longer, Living Better, Living Active
Corevity is clearly not the first health or fitness app in the market, but it will be interesting to follow how their automating and scoring approach and aggregated health graph resonates with consumers. If it is intuitive and makes health understanding simpler, it may offer existing apps a run for their money. But what makes Corevity exciting is its core objective to offer users actionable data and information, not just raw numbers and mindless tickers. If we want to live longer and live better, it’s hard to argue the importance of taking action.
Gail is a Chicago-based food scientist who writes for leading US and European food and technology publications. A devotee of all things shiny, electronic and buzzing, with a passion for building on-line communities and conservation, she is an entrepreneur and founder of a sustainability and social media startup who moonlights on weekends as DJ Moongirl on Moonalice Radio. Clients range from rock bands and media companies to high-tech startups.
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Very nice. People with these types of devices WANT to know more about being healthy and the more information that we can give them, the better off they will be.
I think a FitBit is a great place to start when you want to learn how your steps can impact your health, but this is going a little further. The thing is that this information is not helpful if you do not know what it means, so education is the key.