Moves – the pedometer meets the iPhone

Moves is a great app to help with tracking and enforcing your everyday physical activity.

If tracking your progress is important to improving (tip: it is) then Moves can help by showing you exactly what you’ve been doing and how that correlates to your aims.

Like a Nike FuelBand, Moves uses accelerometers to track your movement and give you a good understanding of how that relates to the real world, both in terms of number of steps and distance covered.

Where it by far exceeds the FuelBand is that as it uses your iPhone to track you, it also knows your speed and general motion. It transmits your data back to the developers’ servers which can (fairly accurately, in my experience) compare your data to others to decide whether you’ve been walking, running, cycling or even travelling by ‘transport’ – car, bus or train.

It’s also free! I have played with Moves for about a month now and it has shown itself to be far more accurate than my FuelBand for calculating my walking, for example.

It’s not perfect – at the moment, there’s no easy way to export your data, for example – but the biggest problem is that it is hungry.

Having your phone’s sat-nav system active all day drains the battery fast. I have an older phone and so its battery isn’t perfect, but I still found there were many days where the battery wouldn’t last until bedtime.

Ultimately, it was this that made me stop using the app – I found I spent longer worrying about needing to top-up my battery than I did about my activity level. However, I already own a FuelBand. If I didn’t have a personal tracker, I would almost certainly still be using Moves.

Rumour has it it that Apple may be building a smartwatch with personal tracking capabilities. Until then, Moves is the smartest personal tracker out.

Samsung Galaxy S4 includes health tracking features

Samsung’s latest superphone, the Galaxy S4, includes a suite of tools to help you monitor your health-stats. More adventurously, they’ve also brought out a range of devices that could bring the tracking trend even further into the mainstream.

S Health, as the new services are collectively known, includes a wireless bodyweight scale, an activity monitor bracelet and a heart rate monitor. There have been suggestions that blood pressure and blood sugar monitors could be added in the future.

body scale s band Heart Rate Monitor

It’s a bold move, but not illogical. The hot rumours suggest that Apple will soon launch an iWatch. Match this with Nike’s low-key admission that they are no longer working on an Android app for their FuelBand and it’s a strong hint that perhaps Apple could be entering the market with Nike’s expertise driving it.

The iPhone’s dominance of the entire third-party device market means that Samsung needs to develop these devices itself to compete.

Do people want self-monitoring equipment? Will they pay for these things? Samsung hasn’t announced their pricing for the gizmos, but similar devices currently sell for around £80-£130 each. It’s a steep price to pay for a watch or a bathroom scale if you’re not a numbers freak. But as these prices come down and more of us are exposed to friends and family using Trackers, perhaps consumers will start to see the benefit of monitoring their health, rather than simply reacting to it.