If you go by fitness app powerhouse Azumio’s launch video for their latest product, Argus, by 2035 keeping track of our personal health and fitness metrics will be as easy glancing into a touchscreen bathroom mirror or recording meals on a touchscreen dining room table. We’ll also all live in a gargantuan loft on Manhattan’s west side, be pretty fit, and very Scandinavian looking.
In the meantime, we have Argus for iOS. By gathering many of Azumio’s popular fitness apps like MapMyFitness, Fitness Buddy, Instant Heart Rate, Sleep Time, and Instant Fitness, Argus creates a single, unified health and fitness data hub. Azumio CEO Bojan Bostjancic explains. “The most frequent request from our user base of over 40 million customers has been for something that would combine all their health and fitness data into one place,” Bostjancic says. “This is exactly what we’ve done with Argus – it serves as the fabric for your wearable devices and other health apps and presents your data in context. Reaching your health and fitness goals will be easier and more fun with Argus.”
The app features a built-in activity tracker that uses the iPhone’s GPS to differentiate between walking and running (auto-detect between cycling and driving is reportedly in the works) and is able to automatically track the data and place it on a map, which is something the Fitbit Flex and other activity trackers just can’t do. Added functionality comes from the app’s compatibility with the Withings scale.
Early looks at the app design, along with Azumio’s existing success in creating easy-to-use and engaging UI, suggest that Argus has real potential to provide data of impressive depth that’s simultaneously simple to access and sort. It will allow users to track health trends over long periods of time with a wide range of metrics. Users can compare their food to their weight and track how much water they consume against the length of their runs. And all of these insights can be mapped against friends or training partners in either the Argus community or through Facebook. The possibilities are intriguing.
Argus is now available for free in the iTunes app store, and before you spend $100 on a fitness tracking device, you might want to check it out. It’s not 2035 yet, and we’re not all drum-tight Nordic women with enough money for a Chelsea penthouse and a fully quantified self, but with a little help from Argus, we might soon be closer than we think. Not bad for a free app.
