Monitor your heart rate using an iPhone App

Fastcompany.com has an interesting piece about a an iPhone app that was created to monitor your heart rate, and then broadcast it to the social network of your choice! The concept fits within the wider area of ‘body computing’, which apparently is about using technology to monitor physical health.

You apparently need to get a patch first that you wear on your chest – this contains the necessary circuitry to sense and broadcast the information to the iPhone, where it’s read in to the App. From there it’s a question of choosing how you want to share that information.

This stuff does exist mind you – the App was created for the third Body Computing Conference, and there is medical device company called Corventis that supplied the patch.

All very cool of course, and a new kind of auto-tweeting perhaps: ‘my heart rate is …..!”

But I wonder if the likes of Nike and Polar are watching and thinking they’d like that slice of the market – unlike this proof of concept, Nike has already done plenty of integration with Apple with its Nike+ product – and Polar are recognised as being the leaders in ECG-accurate heart rate monitors – so how long before they come to market with something that does exactly this?

Well I don’t mind either way – I think the concept in and of itself is a neat one, and certainly those professional sportsmen/women, this might be an interesting way to engage with their fans for example.

[Via: fastcompany.com]