Mockup Demo: http://www.vimeo.com/15179861
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.
App Goals:
-Automate capture data from variety of health/fitness devices
–Analyze data for trends
-Share data
Questions:
-Would this be a useful app?
-Do you think there is a market for this?
-Who would be most benefited from this app?
-What feature am I missing?
Thanks for the feedback!
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.
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.
And i wouldn't think about allow users to entering data manually.
Even the image recognition part is not that difficult, assuming simple LCD display. The problem is whether they are able to handle the universe of exercise machines (or at least say 95% of exercise machines). One possibility is to ask users to submit image and if their machines are not found, ask for their help to take a few snapshots, etc. Given them a badge so they can brag about it (and even help spread the word).
In addition, I'm worried that the type of data provided is highly inconsistent amount machines. Can the OP easily combine incomplete information from different types of exercise machines?
If somehow the OP can manage this, I think it would be a great app, and yes, people are willing to pay money for this app.
If user is using a machine for first time, he has three options, (1) Select one of machines listed in app (2) User creates a machine profile (as shown in video link) (3) Search & download from server where we will continue to add new machine profile & also allow users to post their created machine profile
let's take this one question: Nike is a standard app that comes with the iPod/iPhone. what is it about your app that makes people want to use it, as a complete replacement or as an additional value to this app?
i think to approach this one problem, I would probably draw the focus of my app into an "analysis" piece, and steer away from solely being a "data recording" piece. By being an analysis piece of software, you could look into fitness devices out there, pull data from different types of fitness devices: from exercise equipments, to fitness accessories. this could potentially be a huge win if you could pull it off. it doesn't mean that you can't provide image recognition as an additional feature, it just means that's not where the core value of the app is.
Second question, there are already these fitness social networking communities who are already doing some of this already, how do you plan to compete with them? For example, from their front page, dailymile says that it works with garmin, nike...haven't read about what this means, but my guess is that they already have these devices plugged into their social community. what kind of values can you provide here? if your app allows people to record and analyze data no matter what social community they belong to, then it might be pretty valuable.
of course i haven't done much research so i am just pulling things out of my head without giving these things a whole lot of thought. if you start thinking about making a product that is "indispensible" then it will attract a lot of fans
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)
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.
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.
