Simple idea; Automagically capture data from LCD of Health/Fitness machine.<p>Mockup Demo: http://www.vimeo.com/15179861<p>You just finished your workout on Treadmill or done with your health test on Glucose meter etc. You pull out your Iphone, start TrakBug
App, select machine you just used, and then point camera towards LCD of machine. TrakBug reads data from LCD using image recognition. To handle
non-LCD cases, Trakbug allows you to enter data manually.<p>App Goals:<p>-Automate capture data from variety of health/fitness devices<p>–Analyze data for trends<p>-Share data<p>Questions:<p>-Would this be a useful app?<p>-Do you think there is a market for this?<p>-Who would be most benefited from this app?<p>-What feature am I missing?<p>Thanks for the feedback!
There's a huge market for this, and devices like this are already on the market based on Wi-Fi, rather than image recognition. I know ICON fitness made an accessory last year that interface to standard fitness equipments, and allows you to share data with your Facebook friends.<p>this would be a really useful app if it's based on image recognition, but the question here is does it work? to do this, you would have to take an image, send it back to your server for computation, and pass information back to the user. you'd have to periodically feed images to your server - would it be every second? or 5 seconds? it'll be quite a CPU-intensive task, so image recognition may not be the answer if fitness companies out there are already doing it Wi-Fi.<p>wrt to the use model alone, if you make the user hold the device while they're exercising, no one would do that. it'd be too awkward.<p>And i wouldn't think about allow users to entering data manually.
I have not done thorough research, but based on what i feel\know, i have following opinion/views.<p>1. Analytic part : It should not be hard to implement a simple application to generate good figure, pie charts, etc. (much easier than screen/data reading part)<p>2. Image processing as sole innovation. :
Application will solely be based on it as prime innovation/challenge, but that is not so bad thing. Other solutions will be based on wi-fi, blue-tooth, usb, etc and they will have their own limitations (configuring, downloading, connecting etc). Ease of use may decide the winner. Only if all fitness equipment manufactrs. join and develop a universal application targetting large number of machine to connect using blue-tooth, wi-fi etc, then it may be better solution. I donot see this thing happening very soon. (span of 5 years, my estimate). In this time, this application (based on image processing), if it can establish itself, it may possibly be hard to replace it. It would have already created customer base for itself.<p>3. Application will target low income group.
May not be true. If application works as i see it should, i feel it may be used by all groups.