New fitness tracking device coming soon -- after graduation, that is
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People in the process of getting fit and losing weight often love quantifying their results. Ergo, they love gadgets.
They may love the gadget Garrett Langley invented, but they’ll have to wait to get it. For one, he’s on spring break right now.
Langley is a 21-year-old electrical engineering major at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who, with some help from his biomedical engineering and industrial design friends, came up with a tool that combines a heart rate monitor with an accelerometer (which records forward, back, vertical and rotational movement and its intensity) to track fitness levels and amounts of activity all day long.
‘We’re all pretty active guys,’ Langley said via phone from Hawaii, ‘and we’re also engineers for the most part, and we love quantifying things. We wanted a way to say that yesterday’s 30-minute jog was better than today’s 20-minute interval training — how could we measure and compare our progress?’
Before you say, ‘Wait a minute, that’s already been done!’ — it has, but Langley and his pals put a couple of twists on their apparatus. Similar devices on the market use a chest strap to monitor heart rates — OK for exercise, uncomfortable for wearing 24/7. His can be worn on the wrist or ankle. Second, the information being monitored can be downloaded into a PC where it will be analyzed, allowing users to track their progress online. By plugging in one’s age, height and weight, calorie burn can be calculated. The tool’s name is HappyHR, for ‘happy hour,’ the exhilarating feeling after intense exercise (we think of it more as utter exhaustion, but that’s just us).
‘You can use this as a motivational tool,’ Langley said as tropical birds chirped in the background. ‘If you see that you only exercised twice last week, you know you need to exercise more this week. If I know I’m being tracked, I don’t want to get my report and see I didn’t work out enough.’
He added that there’s a wide built-in market — young, fit people who like the constant number stream, and those just getting into exercise who need to make sure they’re moving forward. Personal trainers could use it to keep up with clients, and friends could devise competitions.
Langley, 44 days away from graduation (not like he’s counting or anything), says he hopes to have development wrapped up by May, then start on manufacturing and distribution.
One potential customer may already be lined up. Said Langley, ‘I see my mom as a great example of someone who would buy this device.’
-- Jeannine Stein
Garrett Langley wears a prototype of the HappyHR. Credit: Georgia Tech Communications & Marketing