Using technology to manage health, fitness and well being. There's a new trend as seen in the recent CES 2013, and thats fitness products. People are increasingly using technology to help manage their health and well being. Over the past year I personally have invested in quite a few apps and peices of hardware used to help me track my weight and my sporting activities. I'm going to discuss the one's im using, and of course would welcome anyone else to share what technology there using for health! Nike+ Fuelband This is my newest and properly my most favourite gadget. I bought it direct from Nike in post-christmas sale. Its a stylish arm band which you were all day from the moment you wake up till sleep. It measures your activity throughout the day, including steps, calories burned and amount of Nike Fuel earned. It has Bluetooth 4 and syncs to any iOS device at the press of the button. In the app you can see a graph on your days activity, earn acheivements, set personal goals (like say burn 10,000 calories over 4 weeks) and see how your facebook friends are doing. I find the social features the best, as i have 2 of my co-workers on there and its a constant battle to win the daily and weekly leaderboard for the most Nike Fuel earnt. Read more at: NIKE, Inc.— Inspiration and Innovation for Every Athlete in the World. Endomondo Endomondo is a free app (and premium app for ad-free and audio couch) for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. It works by using GPS to track your movement and record speed and distance. This app also has a social features allowing you to see your friends progress in real time, as well as send them peptalk which plays out of their phones speaker as they exercise. I use this mostly for cycling, and its also great for walking, running and various other sports. You can use this to record all your sporting activities, see how many calories you have burnt, set yourself goals as well as track your improvement other time. Premium features include heart rate zone monitor (via a bluetooth heart rate monitor) and interval training. Using headphones your phone can tell you every km your current time and if you are faster or slower than the previous km. It's a great app and worth getting if you ever do any exercise outdoors. As it relies on your phones GPS, it is useless for tracking exercise indoors say at a gym however. Read more and get this app at: Endomondo | Community based on free GPS tracking of sports MyFitnessPal There's not much to say about this app, other than if your having problems balancing a diet its an excellent tool. It features a food diary, as well as barcode scanning allowing you to enter every peice of food you consume over a day. At the end of the day it will give you a break down of fat, sugars, protein, carbs and so on allowing you to see where you over-do it and where you need to improve your diet. I don't use this app full time as I have my diet mostly sorted now, but for a month I recorded everything and kept altering my foods until I could sucuessfully balance my diet. Since then I don't really use this app, but for learning what is balanced, what foods don't work its worth giving it a try for a month. Read more and get the app: Free Calorie Counter, Diet & Exercise Journal | MyFitnessPal.com Sleep Cycle (iPhone only) This is a nice cheap (99 cents) app for iPhone, it can be used to track your sleeping patterns as well as work as an excellent alarm clock to wake you up in your lightest phase of sleep. I would recommend checking this out if you have problems waking up in a bad mood or being tired all day. Read more and get the app: Sleep Cycle alarm clock Withings WiFi Scale This is an expensive purchase (at over 100 dollars), but it is the ultimate scale you will ever need. It measures body fat and weight and automatically syncs it to your phone via WiFi or Bluetooth. I use this to keep a record of my weight with weekly checks. However if you don't have the money to burn you could quite easily do this with a cheap scale and a pen. However if you do get one, it does have an awesome website and app where you can view graphs and track. Read more at: Withings - Wireless Scale WS-30 - Introduction