mHealth Sports Technologies
Posts tagged Applications
Give Your Sport Tracking App a Brand New Voice
2December 3, 2010
If you’re using an Android or iPhone sports tracking app with voice cues, then you know the built in text to speech (TTS) engine sounds a bit dull and robotic. Enter SVOX Classic Text To Speech (TTS) Engine, available in the Android Market and App Store. SVOX’s HQ voices are an enormous improvement over the stock TTS engines and are served up in 25 languages, some with more than one to choose from. Once installed and set up properly with your particular voice of choice, any application which uses TTS (sports tracking, navigation, ebook reader, etc.) will suddenly sound better, almost to the point of natural.
I’m using SportsTrackLive’s SportsTracker Pro for my daily running and no other Android sport-tracking app has as many convenient audio cue options. However, the more I rely upon current stats being fed to my head through earbuds, the more weary I grow of More >
Apps, Hardware and Services That I’m Looking at Now.
15June 21, 2010
UPDATED: February 9, 2011
This post will continue to receive updates as the Android ecosystem changes often. Please read my review of Zephyr’s HxM Bluetooth heart rate monitor.
Features to look for in a sports tracker
- Easy access to data during your workouts. Pace, distance, time and heart rate should be easy to read on a single screen.
- Map access during outdoor workouts. Preferably, maps should cache to SDcard to save on data costs. The latest Google Maps affords limited caching now, which most sports tracker apps use. A couple others incorporate offline maps from a variety of map sources.
- Wireless sensor compatibility for data such as heart rate, breath rate, temperature, blood pressure and so on. The only wireless standard presently compatible with available Android handsets is Bluetooth. You’ll need to be running Android 2.1 and higher, as well. The field of available Bluetooth
Good-bye Nokia, Hello Android!
6May 21, 2010
It comes as no surprise to those who know me that I’ve been a Nokia/Symbian fan since the 90′s. Every mobile I’ve owned, save for my first in a 1991 Fujitsu, has been Nokia. Over the years that meant I had a lot of “firsts”; 1st mobile browser, 1st camera, 1st multi-band, 1st BT earbud, 1st to load a 3rd-party app, 1st to use my mobile for music and video, 1st to make VoIP calls… All of this before any iPhone was even rumored.
Oh, the iPhone. In the year leading up to Apple’s iPhone launch, all those who knew me as “that Nokia dude” asked me if I was going to get one and what my thoughts on it were. Made sense, I’ve also remained a Mac user over the years. Well, armed with knowledge from a vast community of ardent Nokia/Symbian loyalists, I knew better. My answer always politely More >
Nokia Sports Tracker Update: Sports Tracking Technologies
5October 21, 2009
I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to bring news to the Nokia Sports Tracker Beta migration to Sports Tracking Technologies issue!
I received a surprise phone call two days ago from Jussi Kaasinen, one of the two-person core team of developers responsible for bringing the Nokia Sports Tracker Beta project to us since March of 2007. Together with the other half of that team, Ykä Huhtala, they founded their own company named Sports Tracking Technologies back in June of this year. Jussi told me that his call was partly in response to my earlier post and partly just to touch base with a long-standing user of the service.
Jussi wanted me to let everyone know that the Sports Tracking Technologies (STT) incarnation is very much alive and kicking, and that they have appreciated More >
Track a Heart – Win a Nokia N79 Active
3March 9, 2009
There’s not much time left remaining for the contest set up by the guys at the Nseries Innovation Newsdesk where the Grand Prize is a Nokia N79 Active phone bundle, which has been called a “healthy twist on Nokia’s smallest Nseries”. The deadline for entries is March 14th!
The challenge for the contest takes advantage of the Nokia’s Sports Tracker mobile application’s geo-tracking features along with your creativity to draw a virtual heart on the planet. Sports Tracker tracks the travelled routes of your workouts, saving that route on a map for you to see, analyze and share with your friends. Sports Tracker also gives you the ability to add geo-tagged pictures and video synchronized along your workout route.
Nokia’s using this contest to promote their newest bundled package, the N79 Active, combining the brilliant N79 phone with a brand new product from Polar heart rate More >