Health and Fitness Technology Trends

Health and fitness technology has seen significant advancements in recent years, shaping the way people monitor and improve their well-being. Some of the prominent trends in health and fitness technology include:

1. Wearable Devices: Wearable fitness trackers, smartwatches, and activity monitors have become increasingly popular. These devices track various metrics such as heart rate, steps taken, calories burned, and sleep patterns. They often sync with mobile apps to provide users with insights and data to monitor and improve their health and fitness levels.

2. Fitness Apps: There is a wide range of fitness apps available that offer workout plans, nutrition tracking, and personalized coaching. These apps provide users with guided workouts, track progress, and offer features like goal setting, social sharing, and community support.

3. Virtual Fitness: Virtual fitness platforms and on-demand workouts have gained popularity, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. These platforms offer a variety of fitness classes, from yoga and HIIT to cycling and dance, that users can access anytime and anywhere. Live-streamed classes and interactive features allow for real-time guidance and engagement.

4. Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is being utilized in health and fitness technology to provide personalized recommendations, analyze data, and improve workout performance. AI-powered chatbots and virtual trainers can offer tailored fitness plans, answer questions, and provide real-time feedback based on individual needs and goals.

5. Smart Home Gym Equipment: The rise of smart home gym equipment has made it more convenient to exercise at home. These devices, such as connected exercise bikes, treadmills, and strength-training equipment, offer interactive workouts, virtual coaching, and performance tracking capabilities.

6. Sleep Technology: Sleep tracking devices and apps help users monitor their sleep patterns, providing insights into sleep quality, duration, and disturbances. These technologies often offer suggestions for improving sleep habits and overall well-being.

7. Biometric Sensors: Advanced biometric sensors are being integrated into fitness devices and apparel, allowing for real-time monitoring of metrics like heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels, and body temperature. These sensors provide deeper insights into performance, recovery, and overall health.

8. Virtual Reality (VR): VR is being utilized in fitness to create immersive workout experiences. Users can participate in virtual fitness classes, explore virtual environments for outdoor workouts, or engage in gamified workouts for increased motivation and engagement.

9. Telehealth and Remote Monitoring: Telehealth platforms enable remote consultations with healthcare professionals, including fitness trainers and nutritionists. Remote monitoring devices and apps allow for the continuous tracking of vital signs, chronic conditions, and fitness progress, enabling remote supervision and personalized feedback.

10. Data Integration and Analytics: Integrating health and fitness data from various sources, such as wearables, apps, and medical devices, allows for a holistic view of an individual's health. Advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms can process and analyze this data to provide actionable insights and predictive recommendations.

It's important to note that these trends are constantly evolving, and new technologies continue to emerge. Businesses in the health and fitness industry should stay updated on the latest trends to provide innovative and personalized solutions to their customers.

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 Different Features of Health and Fitness app

Workout and exercise

                        This features includes workout plans and videos with explanatory comments. App should be able to create an individual training plan depending on the goals and initial data, as well as easily monitor the athlete’s progress.

App provides information about different exercise with images and  videos on how to perform exercises. It also provided logging features were users will be able to log their work out session. 

Personal trainer apps offer a set of tailormade exercises by enabling the user to choose the difficulty level and the type of exercises that they like the most. 

Most fitness apps come with AI-enabled coaches who can guide you to do your exercises in the right manner. These trainers act like human trainers and can also give you tips to build your strength and stamina. 

Yoga and Meditation

This category includes meditation, yoga, and exercise apps with spiritual practices. The meditation applications are useful to calm down an anxious mind by offering guided & unstructured video.

It may consist of guided meditation sessions, nature sounds, and several step-by-step processes to stay in a peaceful and happy space.

With Yoga feature provides list of Yoga images and videos which can be done at home. 

Diet and Nutrition

    These applications help users control their weight by counting calories consumed and burned, controlling water balance, and encouraging healthy eating habits.
The app will help to create grocery shopping lists, and even collect healthy food recipes.

This will help them in the realtime tracking of their calorie intake and the exact requirement as per their body.

With this food logging app, the users can enter the information of what they had for meals throughout the day and they can see how many calories they have consumed. This way they can have firm control over the calorie intake.

 With this feature, you can present the user with specialized diet tips fit for their eating habits. You can also add recipes that are not only healthy but also tasty as well, motivating the user to follow a healthier eating habit.

Activity tracking

Such applications can count the number of steps and count calories. With geolocation, they can track distance walked.
Users can track their progress of activities on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and share the information over social media. They can share their workout hours, distance covered, calories burnt, and more on different social media platforms.

This category includes apps that track physical activity, including steps taken, stairs climbed, hours slept, distance traveled, and calories burned.

The wearable device integration is absolutely important for the workout app because it is the best way to track the progress of an exercise routine. The user can track their heart rate, calories burned, goal progress, etc. with the wearable device integration, you can make it convenient for the users to use your app.

Notification & Reminders

Anyone who is working out regularly would never want to miss a session. However, keeping up with the busy lives; sometimes, it does slips out of our mind. In such cases a push notification from the app can be very useful to remind us of our workout session.
Any individual who is working out consistently will never wish to miss a session.

Online consultation & chat

A lot of time, a workout app is not enough. This is why you need to give the users an option to connect and chat with personal trainers near them. By having this network of gym specialists and personal trainers, you will give the users access to better exercise and training experience. Along with this, you can add the workout checklist app feature to it where the user can make their own workout checklist to follow.

Summary of the Features of Health and Fitness app

• Workout and exercise
• Yoga and Meditation
• Diet and Nutrition
• Activity tracking
• Notification & Reminders
• Online consultation & chat

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Introduction to OCR and Google Cloud Vision

What is OCR

        OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the use of technology to recognize printed or handwritten text characters in digital images of physical documents, such as scanned paper documents.

        The image is converted to a duotone image (ie black and white). Analyze the bright and dark areas of the image

Dark area = character to be recognized

Bright area = background

OCR works by Pattern recognition and feature detection 

Pattern recognition

• Techniques that try to match characters with the character matrix stored in the database 
• Rely on the input characters are consistent fonts, such as OCR A and B

Feature detection

• More sophisticated identification methods 
• Break down characters into "features" such as lines, loops, and intersections

OCR Application

• Passport scanning, ID detect
• Scan document
• Automated data entry, extraction and processing
• Receipt and Invoice Scanning
• Electrical Medical Records
• Forms and Surveys
• Bank : Electronic document processing (checks, etc.)
• ANPR / Traffic : Read vehicle license plate/VIN number
• Logistics: Sort the mail.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning

Internet of Things (IOT) Basics

Google Cloud Vision

    Cloud Vision allows developers to easily integrate vision detection features within applications, including image labeling, face and landmark detection, optical character recognition (OCR), and tagging of explicit content.

Google Cloud – Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Source : Google Cloud Vision

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Different sensors used in fitness trackers

Different sensors used in fitness trackers   

          Smartwatches with Fitness trackers have become essential lifestyle devices that helps track how active you are along with basic health parameters.

The smartwatches do a lot more than showing time, show notifications on your wrist. They're everything in one: a fitness tracker, a wallet, and in some cases, even making phone calls.

            A smartwatch can also save your life with elevated heart rate alerts and automatically connect you to emergency services if you fall. Electrocardiogram (ECG) and blood oxygen (SpO2) readings are perks of certain premium models, too. It still has a compass, fall detection and GPS.

Following are the different sensors used in fitness trackers:

Ambient light sensor: This sensor is also used in mobile devices to increase or decrease the screen brightness, thus saving your battery life. This sensor tweaks display brightness based on the surrounding light for better battery life.

3 axis accelerometer: This is an electromechanical device that senses gravity, as well as linear accelerations, detects movement, and tracks direction. This track's forward and backward movement by sensing gravity and determine the body’s orientation, position, and also rate of change of speed.

Altimeter: This sensor uses atmospheric pressure to sense any changes in the altitude. Detects Change in height, are you climbing stairs or going down to calculate calories count. 

Barometer : This measures and shows the atmospheric pressure, thus you can know whether it is going to be sunny or rainy day.

Best Fitness Tracker and Smart Watch

Optical heart rate: This sensor detects heartbeats per minute. The device with an optical HR sensor calculates your heartbeat  per minute using a special algorithm. This sensor uses light to check the speed of blood flow on the wrist. When the heartbeats, blood moves quickly inside thus less light is reflected back to the sensor and is detected as a heartbeat 

SpO2: This sensor used to monitor and measure blood oxygen levels. It uses LEDs as a light source to emit light into the tissue and a photodetector is used to collect the light back from the skin and measure how well the oxygen is supplied to each part of your body from your heart. 

Bioimpedance sensor: This sensor is used in Smart weighing scales to measure your body composition such as the total body fat w.r.t your lean body mass.

Proximity sensor : These sensors saves battery and wakes the display when needed.  It helps in lowering the power consumption by putting the device to sleep If you are not wearing the fitness tracker, this sensor enables the device to sleep and save battery when not in use and turns off display

Compass : It helps in direction and Maps. It shows the direction of magnetic north and bearings from it. A compass helps Map applications to run on a smartwatch and also gives the device a sense of direction.

ECG sensor: This sensor is to detect the minute electrical impulse that your heart sends out with every heartbeat This sensor detects this minute heart signal through the electrodes on the wearable.

GPS : It works by tracking your exact location while you are walking or running by calculating the distance between series of GPS satellites. It helps in detecting how much you are running, the location of wearable, and tracks your activity.

LTE : A LTE enabled device, simply means that is has built-in mobile connection i.e., you can make/receive calls directly from the device itself.

Gyroscope : Used to detect motion . It is used with other sensors to determine whether you are actually running or simply jogging.

UV sensor: It measures exposure to harmful sunlight. The UV sensor monitors the sunlight and alerts when you’re absorbing dangerous UV radiation whether the sunlight outdoors is harmful or not.

Magnetometer :  The sensor measures the magnetic field of the earth and can also be used as a compass. Works along with the GPS and compass to determine the exact  coordinates of your location 

Electrodermal activity sensor : It measure stress along with a heart rate tracker, ECG, and skin temperature sensor. It detects small electrical changes in the sweat level of your skin and helps you manage your stress.

Best Fitness Tracker and Smart Watch

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Introduction to AR Core

What is AR (Augmented Reality)

• Blend real world in to the digital world

• Integrate virtual content with the real world as seen through phone's camera

ARCore is Google’s platform for building augmented reality experiences
 

What is Google’s Tango Project (Prior to AR Core)

        ARCore has its origins in Tango, which is/was a more advanced AR toolkit that used special sensors built into consumer mobile device.
        Google’s (Peanut phone , Yellow Stone tablet) , Intel’s Real sense Smart phone , Lenovo Phab -2 , Asus Zen phone are equipped  with special sensors
        Later Google stopped Tango project as ARCore is evolved with less dependent on sensors as compared to Tango

Hardware of Phone used by ARCore

• Fundamental concepts behind ARCore

• Motion tracking

• Feature points (through camera) + Motion sensors (through IMU: Accelero , Gyro)

• Point , PointCloud , Pose are some of the classes exposed by ARCore SDK we can see how  user's position is tracked in relation to the feature points identified on the real couch.

• Environmental understanding 

• Uses technique called meshing 

• Cluster of feature points used and returned as planes to applications along with each plane’s boundary

How does AR Core works

AR Core fundamentally does two things

    1. Motion Tracking
        Building it’s own understanding of real world (Environmental understanding , Light Estimation , Orientation points , Anchors , Trackables

    2. Environmental limitations
        For now, limitations that may hinder accurate understanding of surfaces include:

• Flat surfaces without texture, such as a white desk

• Environments with dim lighting

• Extremely bright environments

• Transparent or reflective surfaces like glass

• Dynamic or moving surfaces, such as blades of grass or ripples in water

        When users encounter environmental limitations, indicate what went wrong and point them in the right direction.   

            AR application that has identified a real-world surface through meshing. The plane is identified by the white dots. In the background, we can see how the user has already placed various virtual objects on the surface.

Light estimation

        Average intensity and color correction of a given camera image
Scene of realism is increased by applying the same light condition to virtual objects LightEstimate , LightEstimate.State are some of the classes used to get lightning condition User Interaction , Orientation points , Anchors and Trackables.
        Takes an (x,y) coordinate corresponding to the phone's screen
Projects ray into camera’s view of the real world
        Returns Plane/feature points that the ray intersects and Pose (kind of OpenGL model matrices) of that intersection in world space
HitResult , Pose , Anchor (fixed location and orientation of real world) are some of the classes provided by ARCore in this context
Trackable (interface) is something that ARCore can track and that Anchors can be attached to 

Note: 
        Because ARCore uses clusters of feature points to detect the surface's angle, surfaces without texture, such as a white wall, may not be detected properly.
        To reduce CPU costs, reuse anchors when possible and detach anchors that you no longer need.

Link for reference: https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/java/cloud-anchors/overview-android

References:
Samples: https://github.com/google-ar/sceneform-android-sdk.git 
https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/java/quickstart

Books on ARCore

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Android A11 features

                       

             Android 11 introduces great new features and APIs for developers. Android 11 focus more on People-centric and expressive, with a new controls space and more privacy features.
            Extend your apps with conversation notifications and bubbles, try one-time permissions, surface devices and media in the controls. Work faster with tools like compatibility toggles, ADB incremental installs, and more!

Lets look into Android 11 features

Conversation notifications

                There are now three notification categories: Conversations, Alerting, and Silent. The Conversations section, quite obviously, houses all your conversations. This would mean any app where you are directly communicating with someone else, including text messages and chat apps.     

            Meanwhile, the Alerting and Silent sections act as they have before in Android 10. You can also easily silence notifications from certain apps, which would push all future notifications to the Silent section. With Android 11, you now have more control over notifications than you ever had previously.

Notification history

            In Android 11! A new feature gives you the option of saving every single notification that landed on your phone over the past 24 hours. You can check the running list, find the notification you accidentally swiped, and see what you missed.

Related: Here’s a list of Android 11 phones

Chat bubbles in Android 11

             For all chat applications Android, you already know how chat bubbles work. With Messenger, a “chat head” appears on your phone that overlays on top of pretty much every other app. A quick tap of the icon launches the chat and then you can minimize the chat back to an icon. Done with the conversation? You can remove the chat head until the next conversation starts

Android 11 screen recorder

            The screen recorder function lives in the Quick Settings tiles. You tap the Screen Record feature which gives you a few options before you start recording. For example, you can choose whether or not your screen-taps should also be recorded and whether the phone should capture audio, too.

Media controls

                If you are playing music on your Android 10 phone, a music player appears at the top of your notifications drawer. Of course, with Android 11, that section of the drawer is now reserved for conversations, so the media player needed to move. Google decided to move it one rung up to the Quick Settings section.    
                When you swipe down your notification drawer, the media controller will be pretty small. It will show you the app it’s related to, cover art, basic controls, and on which system the media is playing. If you pull down again on the drawer, the alert expands and shows the information

Smart device controls

                Google added a new section in Android 11 that allows you to easily control your various devices without needing to open an app.

                You can hold down the power button to launch the new tool. At the top, you’ll find the usual power features, but underneath, you’ll see a lot more options. There’s a Google Pay shortcut that allows you to quickly choose which payment method you want your next contactless transaction to use. Under that, you’ll see a bunch of buttons connected to your various smart home products.
                
        The Device Controls feature, available starting in Android R, allows the user to quickly view and control external devices such as lights, thermostats, and cameras from the Android power menu. Device aggregators (for example, Google Home) and third-party vendor apps can provide devices for display in this space.​

One-time permissions and auto-reset

            Android 11 gives the user even more control by allowing them to give permissions only for that specific session.
            Similarly, Android 11 will now “auto-reset” apps you haven’t used in a while. If you granted location data permissions to an app that you haven’t opened up in a long time, Android will now revoke all permissions. Next time you open the app, you’ll need to approve those permissions again. 

Dark Theme 

            With Android 11, users can now schedule the dark theme using one of two different metrics. You can schedule a dark theme to turn on or off when the sun sets or rises. You can also set up a custom schedule for dark mode activation if you wish.

 

Some of the other features are 

Concurrent Camera Streaming : Many devices have the hardware capability to stream multiple camera sensors concurrently.

Camera Bokeh : to make the bokeh feature available to third-party apps​

Generic Kernel Image​ : Android R introduces the Generic Kernel Image (GKI), which addresses kernel fragmentation by unifying the core kernel and moving SoC and board support out of the core kernel into loadable modules.​

Device Type Limit​ : In Android R, no limit on the number of audio device types to allow new audio device types to be added​

Soft restarts​ : Android R supports soft restarts, which are runtime restarts of processes in the user space used to apply updates that require a reboot (for example, updates to APEX packages).​

Zombie permissions : Android will automatically revoke an app’s permissions after an undetermined time of inactivity—somewhere between 60 and 90 days. Launching an app within that time reinstates any permissions you’ve granted​

Notification/Sound Muting​ : Device vibration and sounds can hurt image and video quality, especially for cameras with optical image stabilization module​. camera app could use the (DnD) APIs to mute the vibration and sounds
Offline Processing​: Today camera apps must wait for all requests to be fully processed before it can disconnect from the camera or switch to a different configuration, The offline processing API allows the camera HAL to perform post-processing in the background to improve the latency of mode switching or camera closing​

Android 11 updates via Play Store

            Each year, Google releases the latest version of Android. Each month, it pushes out the latest Android security patch. Both of these updates get funneled to your phone either by your carrier or equipment manufacturer. Because of this, some phones get many updates very quickly, while others either get them much slower or not at all.o counteract this, Android 11 gives more power related to updates over to the Google Play Store. This allows Google to bypass carriers and OEMs entirely and push out updates to everyone.

App-pinning to the share sheet

            You can now pin apps to your share sheet in order to easily access them whenever you want to share something.This feature allows you, the user, to control which apps appear at the top of the list when you want to share something.

Improved prediction tools

            Android 11 will seemingly reduce the work you need to do on your phone, by predicting your habits and patterns.
            One such example of this is smart folders, so you can let Android 11 automatically sort your apps into folders of similar apps, like games or productivity tools.
            App suggestions is also tweaked to suggest apps based on your routine - for example, if you always log onto your Fitbit app first thing in the morning to examine your sleep habits, the phone will now automatically pop that app into the Home screen in the morning so it's easily accessible.
            Finally, apparently the Smart Reply feature already usable in Android phones has received some tweaks. This mode suggests some automatic responses when you receive a message, letting you reply with one tap (if any of the responses are appropriate) but it's not clear what's new here.

New phones coming with Android 11

• OnePlus 8

• Oppo Find X2 and Find X2 Pro

• Realme X50 Pro

• Xiaomi Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro

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