The new year is only 18 days old and still throwing middle-of-the-night tantrums like a newborn baby. Some straggling decorations and unwanted presents have hidden themselves in a dark living room corner and survived your cleaning efforts and that coat still smells of champagne, or whatever was left of it.
However, despite its novelty, the new year is already looking like the old one. Especially in the resolutions department because, if we really want to be honest with ourselves, we’re already falling behind in our self-improvement regime. Like last year and the year before that, false achievements and rewards are chipping away at our resolve. A celebratory snap of chocolate for maintaining a diet for one week has turned into a consoling box of chocolates for skipping our diet for one week.
And yet, we do want to be better people. We want to be masters of our fate, better at our jobs, have higher self-esteem, nurse true friendships, earn more money and sleep more. And all while being fitter and looking better.
But we cannot do all that on our own: after all, if we had that kind of ambition and self-control, we wouldn’t need resolutions. So what we need is a little help from our friend: technology.
App and away
According to Luke Wroblewski, author of Mobile First (Eyrolles, 2012), more mobile phones are sold over 24 hours than babies born.
What is fuelling the constantly increasing sales of smartphones is app development: in fact, the exaggeration that there’s an app for everything has turned into a truism.
Health- and fitness-related apps are especially popular. According to consultancy and market research company Research2Guidance, there are currently more than 40,000 mobile health apps in app stores around the world, which generate more than four million downloads every day.
These apps vary from those intended for fitness and training to more specialised apps such as pregnancy trackers, self-testing monitors and informative apps.
If your New Year’s resolution is to cut down on your alcohol intake, then the NHS Choices Drinks Tracker is perfect for you. By inputting information about what and how much you drink, this app will calculate your intake in units ofalcohol. It will then give you free personalised feedback.
Another specialised app is called Phobia Free. Approved by the NHS, this app aims to cure arachnophobia by using systematic desensitisation.
Fitness gamification provides a good incentive to maintain your fitness regime. The Walk Game app tells you that a bomb has exploded at a train station and you have to transport a package by foot to save the world. The faster and longer you walk, the greater the chance you have of saving the world. That will certainly get you off the couch and walking.
A gadget a day
Not many people have the time to attend fitness classes while others prefer to train solo. However, training is more effective when a person is motivated and is given a dose of encouragement. Gad-gets can do that.
Tracking devices not only give you valuable information about how fast you’re walking or the distance that you have cycled: by virtue of compiling such data, these gadgets can give you the motivation to do better next time.
If your sport of choice is cycling, there is a variety of bike gadgets, ranging from simple sensors that tell you your speed and distance to more expensive GPS devices that give you constant access to metrics such as elevation, distance and speed. Once your session is over, you can transfer the data to your smartphone, analyse every section of your ride and plan improvements.
For those who have committed themselves to a walking regime in 2015, you can invest in a pedometer which will give you plenty of encouragement to increase your daily step count. The more sophisticated pedometers will count your steps and tell you how many calories you have burned.
Many might view sleep as a waste of time. However, a good night’s sleep is essential for your health. Sleep sensors monitor your sleep patterns and help you optimise your sleep environment so that you avoid waking up in the middle of the night.
Most sleep monitors include a wearable monitor which combines with an app to optimise your sleeping.
Wear and don’t tear
Wearable technology is quickly gaining in popularity. This year, especially with the launch of the Apple Watch, this popularity is expected to get a further boost. Other technology giants will also focus their attention on wearables.
Google’s collaboration with smartwatch pioneers Pebble will continue, while LG, Sony and Motorola will continue to refine their smartwatches. Samsung, which in 2014 released five watches, will probably be adding toits portfolio.
However, wearable technology isn’t just about smartwatches: you canalso get the right motivation fromsmart-clothing.
Clothing brands have started to make sportswear with built-in heart-rate and respiration monitoring, which means that you don’t have to wear another device when out running.