People love sci-fi movies especially the gadgets used by the characters in the plot. We are living in a world that those gadgets seen in the movie are no more sci-fi stuff. They are a reality now. As a kid, we have seen in a movie where people telecommute for their work and do conference calls via video telecast. Right now, the whole world is doing telecommuting and video conferencing for their daily office works. Marriages happened with the help of video conferencing, in fact, we are living more into the sci-fi world now.
The emergence of fitness tracker
A couple of decades ago, we used to go walking, cycling, running, and swimming was considered the main fitness activity. Apart from this, many use timing as their method of measuring the exercise routine. Similarly, some sets of people aim for the known locations or count numbers in the reps. For say, 200 skipping the rope or 20 minutes of cycling or 10 rounds of running the cricket ground.
A decade ago, people started to sense the emergence of fitness trackers where a fitness band or watch could track your performance like steps count and calories burnt. They tend to add a few more things like a workout base calorie counter, sleep trackers and all these details can be visible via a smartphone application. When you fast forward to the end of this decade, we found the exponential improvement in the scale of features added to the fitness tracker.
How did I react to a fitness tracker band in 2013?
I was working in a malware analysis lab in the year 2013. One of my fellow researchers (my colleague and my roommate) is known for buying the latest gadgets in the market. He bought headphones for 500 USD and a mobile phone for the USD 600-700 range. And he always carries a high-end gaming laptop with good solid portable disks. As a roommate and colleague, I felt he was a cool guy. One day he comes up with a fitness tracker that cost around 200 USD. Seeing the fitness tracker for the first time and hearing about the cost, I reacted that it was a totally a waste to spend money on a fitness tracker.
Social status
Realized after some time the tracker became one of the symbols of social status like the mobile phone. Fitness tracker evolved as almost like mobile phone not just as watch or tracker. Remember, in the initial days of mobile phones in the international market, people started using their social status and started saying that the mobile phone can also be used to check the time, calendar and even it replaced the phone book registers in the home. Even Elon Musk told in the interview that he stopped using watches because his phones showed the time. Using the reverse strategy, the innovators come up with the idea of the watch that can be used as a phone. And they started charging in the cost range of a mobile phone. For instead, the Apple watch sold at the price range of 500 USD and the Samsung Galaxy Watch is nearly 300-400 USD in cost. It finally evolved as an indicator of social status.
For the Future- Non Invasive fitness device
With the current technology, we can easily track things like blood oxygen saturation, pulse rate and track the number of steps count. But in recent days, one could use devices like Apple Watch to measure the ECG, respiration rate (during sleep) and Samsung Galaxy Watch to measure the body composition of the user. But, wait...
We are yet to see the future, things like purely non-invasive technology. That technology will be able to measure blood pressure accurately without missing any points for systolic and diastolic measurements. On top of that, it may measure the blood glucose level as we are measuring the SPO2 now. Further, it will be added with other vital readings, and blood function test results without using the method of traditional invasive method.
We need to wait for a few years to see the innovation and ideas which we mentioned in this post.
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