The predicted continued buoyancy of the healthcare technology market is made in a new survey conducted by The Global Wellness Institute. The Institute is a non-profit organization with the aim of promoting wellness worldwide through public education and supporting business in relation to preventative health and wellness. This is achieved through four pillars: research, initiatives, roundtable discussions, and wellnessevidence.com, an informatikon “hub”.
The report reiterates that the health and fitness market is an established multi-trillion-dollar industry. Part of this includes the continuing popularity of fitness wearables. Rather than the health fitness market approaching saturation, the opportunities for continued growth in the sector are set to continue. These areas for expansion include remote training and virtual and augmented reality. In this three-part report we focus on remote training (for the assessment of virtual and augmented reality, see Digital Journal’s article “Health technology embraces virtual and augmented reality“), plus our assessment of what gym managers can do with this technology.
What is remote training?
This means different things to different people and companies. However, I think most would agree that “remote” means that the students and instructor are not physically in the same classroom. For health technology, it means people participating in fitness classes when not actually in gym; instead the services are accessed while at home or at work.
Examples of remote training developments in healthcare include having a personal trainer located many miles away, tracking your fitness via FaceTime or Skype. On such example is LonanFit.com, which is is an entirely online personal training business. The founder, Lonan O’Herlihy, told The Daily Telegraph: “It’s very motivational. You cut out a lot of the excuses for not training. I don’t hear clients saying they’re ‘too tired to make it to a session’, or ‘they’re away travelling’ or ‘they don’t like being around others in a gym’ anymore.”
At a different level, the company Amaven recognizes that people have different needs in terms of interacting with a trainer. Some want a full on-approach, others simply want to be emailed an exercise plan. The Amaven system is geared to automatically generates a personalized exercise plan for every client. The plan is adjusted according to the progress made by the client.
A third example, taking a different approach, is the Kaizen App. This app lets the user select from the best fitness coaches, with profiles of the most popular coaches across the world. Coaches can be accessed an anything from a one-day workout or a 12-week program can be selected.
These remote access examples demonstrate how much more room the digital health and fitness industry has left to expand. There are plenty of more innovations to come, not least with the role of virtual reality for enhancing the fitness experience and the role the gym manager can play with in this development.
