Mobile phone with pedometer built in?

by philg

Lisa (skinny), Alex (husky), Sammy (skinny), and I (still trying to get down to 180 for flying the R22 helicopter) were walking today around Harvard Square and wondering why pedometers weren’t built into cell phones.  A Web search upon returning home revealed just one such phone and it was available only in Japan back in 2003(http://walking.about.com/b/a/036931.htm).  As our nation gets fatter and we don’t even have to get off the couch to answer the phone, wouldn’t this be a natural addition to the one electronic gadget that almost everyone carries?

3 thoughts on “Mobile phone with pedometer built in?”

  1. Why put a pedometer in a cell phone? For exercise it is time and effort level that matter, not distance. For navigation access to the GPS supposedly built into some new cell phones would be a lot more useful.

  2. Yep, the new e-911 service is supposed to include gps in the cell phone. There has a been some discussion about the appropriateness of developing applications based on it. SOmething about balancing privacy with commercial applications. Business owners would love to be able to send you advertisements when you are in the neighborhood, but most americans get squeamish about being tracked like animals. I doubt that anybody would invest the money into developing applications that do not have an instant commercial return tho.

    Here is an older article about the technology (1999)

    http://www.skyaid.org/LifeWatch/gps_cell_phone_etdn_1999.htm

    And some more recent info (2003):

    http://www.emporia.edu/earthsci/student/aber1/

    Wow, look an actual product, amazing what google can do:

    http://www.networksinmotion.com/products/AtlasTrack/index.html

  3. It would have to be GPS, since all other ones are really worthless. (Except Nike has one that works using tilt sensors and accelerometers, but it has to go on your shoe.)

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