As a part of our Fit Kids February initative, Time Warner Cable News' Adam Balkin looks at some high-tech activity monitors that encourage kids to exercise.
It’s using the problem as the solution. Technology, like video games and mobile devices, is often to blame for kids not getting up and exercising more these days. But, there are plenty of ways technology is being used as a way to get kids to be more active.
For example, they all like to capture videos of themselves swinging a bat, a club, jumping, skateboarding, biking. They can clip the $150 Blast Motion sensor to themselves, and it will add an overlay of stats to all the videos they capture with their mobile devices.
“If you’re just talking about standard basketball or athletic performance, the action cam can be things like vertical height, your hang time, your rotation, your acceleration. If you’re talking about baseball it’d be things like your swing speed, is it up, is it down, is it level. If you’re talking about golf it’ll be things like loft, tie and tempo," says Blast Motion’s Donovan Prostrollo.
The $400 Hexoskin shirts are also designed to help children train better either overall or for a specific sport. The biometric shirts - out for adults for a while now - measure things like breathing, heart rate and running cadence, then shoot that information over to a mobile device or computer.
“This shirt will ensure that your kids will have the proper training and it will create the data that you will need to follow your kids and they grow up to follow their progress and work towards a higher level of performance," says Pierre Fournier of Hexoskin.
Finally, looking towards the future, the Connected Cycle Smart Pedal is set to launch later this year. The device turns any bike into a smart bike.
“When you go on the bike we record all the statistics of your trip so we have the course, the distance you made, the calories you might have burned, and the speed,” says Christian Kravanja of Connected Cycle.
An added benefit to this one: it will send you an immediate alert on your mobile device the second someone attempts to steal your bike.