How to Beat Your Personal Best With Health & Fitness Tracking Technology

Those of us who care most about improving our levels of health and fitness are prepared to try different techniques to achieve those marginal gains.

Often, a target driven approach to exercise works best. But keeping track of our activity, diet, sleep patterns and even our mood can be tricky.

Many of us use a personal trainer or ask our training partners to reward us with praise or let us know when our levels drop, but relying on somebody else to take note of every step, run, or power nap can put a strain on the relationship.

This is where artificial intelligence can really help. Fitness trackers like a Fitbit or Apple Watch can help us monitor our fitness and health at a basic level, but what if we want to take things a stage further?

Luckily thanks to advancements being made in the fields of technology, AI, and science, we now have the option to micro-manage every aspect of our healthy lives.

Imagine an app that could complete an initial assessment of the state of our health and fitness, and assign us a score that is then updated on a daily basis.

All of a sudden, our training regime takes on a different dimension.

Instead of competing with friends or opponents who are physically and mentally dissimilar to us, we can compete against ourselves. How much sleep did we get this week compared to last week? How did it improve or worsen our mood? How many steps did we take yesterday? How many should we take today to register an overall improvement and upward trend?

These are the basics, and they can make the difference between an unfulfilling, tedious workout, and a challenge that is both mentally and physically rewarding.

But we can go still further than that. Why do we spend our time working out after all? To keep ourselves physically and mentally alert, so we can be our best selves, and deal with everything life throws at us.

So, the more information, the better. Using AI and machine learning techniques, we now have the ability to retain and store data, and merge it with cutting-edge research and medical knowledge to produce actionable, smart recommendations about how to micro-manage every aspect of our health.

All of a sudden, those marginal gains we've been desperate to make will start to feel like they are within touching distance, after all. We just need to identify the patterns that are helping us improve and those that are holding us back.

On a more serious note, whether we are over training or under training, physical exercise is all about one thing: staying healthy. Tracking our fitness with AI can help us discover a great deal about the state of our health. Analysis of diet, sleep, and mood, for example, can be used to search for signs of early-stage illness, or susceptibility to a particular disease, such as hypertension, diabetes, heart complications, or even cancer.

This relatively new phenomenon, the ability to rely on technology to let us know how we can optimise our chances of staying fit and healthy, is closely related to a new trend in health care known as personalised health.

We are all unique, and by sharing data with a sophisticated AI driven personal assistant, we can help it learn about our health, and teach us how to improve it. Modern AI learns fast, never forgets a single detail, and can compare and contrast our data with millions of other similar datasets to try to identify potential weaknesses, strengths, or anomalies.

At Eterly, we are building the world's first health and fitness app designed for healthy longevity. Our personalised AI assistant is designed to understand every user on a deeply personal level, and help them learn every little detail about their health.

This can make a huge difference in the long run, because we all waste a lot of time and energy training at the wrong time, or under the wrong conditions. With proper planning, organised on our behalf by a miniature supercomputer, there's no limit to how much we can improve.

So next time you are out for a run, at the gym, playing team sports, or planning your week's shopping, and you feel you could do with a helping hand; fear not; the robots are coming, and they are working just for you!

Andrew Ahachinsky is the founder of Eterly, the world's first fitness and health monitoring app designed for healthy life-extension.