Apple Watch fitness guru Jay Blahnik outlines fitter world through wearable sensors

APPLE’S fitness guru Jay Blahnik who spearheaded the Apple Watch fitness app predicts a future of a healthier world through more wearable gadgets.

Three ring circuits ... Apple Watch turns the aim for good health into three colourful rings. Pictures: Justin Lloyd

EXCLUSIVE

FIRST Apple made your phone smarter. Now, through the sensors built into the Apple Watch and global health projects using apps on the iPhone, Apple plans to make you healthier.

Two years ago, one of the first signs that Apple was finally working on a smartwatch came when news leaked that health and fitness Jay Blahnik had been lured away from Nike to head up a secret project at Apple.

Blahnik said that project, which resulted in the launch of the Apple Watch in April, involved putting more than 10,000 Apple employees through more than 18,000 hours of fitness testing, wiring them up to a range of sensors and testing them on a range of equipment and, with the use of climate chambers, in a range of environments.

Blahnik’s insights, in an exclusive interview with News Corp Australia, comes a few days before the WWDC conference in San Francisco, the biggest annual event in the Apple calender in which Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to give a report on the launch of the Watch and hints of where to from here.

As Blahnik says, creating the fitness and health apps for the Apple Watch involved studying more people in more conditions than many university medical research projects have done.

In the early stages, the project was so secret many of the Apple staff did not even know what they were working on.

As Blahnik says, it would have been easier to take a shortcut.

Three ring circuits ... Apple Watch turns the aim for good health into three colourful rings. Pictures: Justin Lloyd

“Like with anything else we ever gotten into that is new, we really want to make it part of our culture and our DNA. And I think the best way to do that is to actually lean the hard way, to invest the time, to do it from scratch,” he said.

“To set up the labs, to test the things that quite frankly you could get an off the shelf algorithm for X, Y, Z. You could borrow or draft off what you’ve read or research over here or seen the way other apps have done it, but then you don’t get the leanings.

“And often times in the learning process, understanding what you want to do and understanding what you don’t know are just as important.”

Some have described the iPhone as the world’s most popular fitness gadget, through the popularity of fitness apps such as Strava, MyFitnessPal and MapMyRun. But Apple is a latecomer to the activity tracking market dominated by Fitbit and Jawbone.

Playing catch-up, just as Apple did with the iPod, gives the Cupertino-based company the advantage it can follow a different path.

With the Apple Watch, that path meant trying to be more than another version of a pedometer.

Blahnik describes the aim of the Apple Watch, in terms of fitness tracking, to be three things: make you sit less, move more and get 30 minutes of exercise a day.

As Blahnik says, it “gives you three ways to win the day”.

While the activity tracking market is exploding, the challenge for makers of wearable fitness devices is to ensure the must-have gadget does not soon become a forgotten fad, joining other exercise equipment that people buy with good intentions but soon ignore with lack of interest.

A report by digital business analysts Endeavour Partners last year found a third of people who have owned an activity tracker put it aside with six months of their purchase.

Blahnik acknowledges the problem with activity trackers that sum up your day with a simple metric such as steps or calorie burn.

“One day when you forget to charge it you don’t put it back on because it isn’t telling you anything new,” he said.

“What’s exciting about the Watch, even when I’m not thinking about health and fitness it’s there in the background tracking. You’ll be wearing it for many reasons. You’ll be wearing it to get your notifications. You’ll be wearing it to get your phone calls.

“The more we do to help people feel comfortable wearing it all day, the more opportunity there is to impact their health.

“Health and fitness is not the sum of your workouts, it’s the sum of how you spend your day, your week, your life.

Ready, set, go ... the Apple Watch encourages you to do 30 minutes of heart-rate elevated exercise a day. Pictures: Justin Lloyd

“When you measure just quantity, whatever metric whether it’s calories or steps or some other metric, for all day activity tracking you miss a really big part of the story.

“As a trainer, if someone came up to me and said I did 7000 steps today, my motivational trainer voice would be `congratulations’ but in my head what I would be thinking to myself was did any of those steps hit at least a level that would impact your health or did you just take them around the office and not get a little briskness to it.

“The second question I would ask is did you get them all by 1pm and then sit around the rest of the day.”

Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about future products and plans and Blahnik would not reveal hints as to what changes in the fitness space we can expect to see in the next generation of Apple Watch.

The first generation Apple Watch has a heart-rate monitor. Some experts are tipping the second generation will have other health sensors such as the ability to track blood pressure, blood glucose and oxygen saturation.

“One thing that we’ve learnt more than anything from the lab and hours of user studies is the obvious which is the human body is really complex and no matter what you do and what sensors you put in and what hardware you do, there will be no finish line. It will constantly be something we can get better at,” Blahnik says.

“We’ll get better at measuring more activities. This is where there will always be a journey.

“It isn’t really a question on whether Apple is going to do it. This space is ripe for exploration. The notion of all day sensing, whether it comes from something as simple as the steps coming from your phone, to heart rate throughout the day through GPS when you’re running, the fact that you get more and more information about your day.

“There is going to be really interesting things to learn that if you can only get at a moment of time, it isn’t even the same information. It doesn’t even tell you the same story.”