In a press release, the health care organization wrote that “patients will have 24/7 access to lab results, diagnostic information, direct and secure email access to their doctors, and will also be able to order prescription refills”.

Being able to access medical records can be a huge advantage to patients, particularly the elderly, carers and patients with chronic conditions who need to get updates on lab results, fill prescriptions and communicate with the doctor’s office.

The Android app contains sections for medical records, pharmacy center, appointment center, message center, and a Kaiser location facility finder. Your secure, electronic medical record includes your health history, information about allergies and immunizations, details about prescriptions and any ongoing health conditions, health care reminders, and most test results.

The app for the iPhone has not been released yet, but users can in the meantime access their records on a mobile-optimized version of kp.org and save the site as a shortcut icon to their iPhone device.

Kaiser said that in “2011 alone, more than 68 million lab test results were made available online to Kaiser Permanente patients. The mobile-optimized site and the new app make that information, and much more, securely available at members’ fingertips”.

Source: Marketwatch

If you own an Android smartphone, it is probably your constant companion throughout the day (and the night, too, but let’s not go there). Today, I would like to share two simple, fun and free Android apps that you can use to monitor your water intake and be reminded to drink more often.

Water Your Body [1.6+]

Water Your Body is one beautiful app:

As you can see, it’s ad-supported, but they need to make money somehow, right? The shelves look a lot like iBooks shelves, only instead of books, you fill them with cups and bottles showing how much water you’ve been drinking throughout the day. When you first start the app it asks for your weight (and assumes 65kg) and then decides how much water it thinks you should be drinking every day. I have no idea where it comes up with that number, and I see no reason to place too much stake in it. But as a tracker, it is just lovely. Right by the daily water dosage there’s a cup with an arrow. Tapping it lets you set your default cup:

I love this feature, because throughout a typical day, I am likely to drink water out of one of several typical containers. Water Your Body lets me configure those cups and bottles in advance, gorgeous icons and all. Once you select a default cup, a short tap on the shelf would log that cup. You can also press and hold to pop up a menu that would let you specify a different cup.

If the cup sizes and icons aren’t right for what you need, just hop on over to the Settings menu:

You can now enter the Setting Cup option and fill in the list with whatever cups and volumes work for you:

The settings screen is also a good place to discuss the app’s reminder feature. You can have the app prompt you to drink throughout the day, at set intervals. A reminder is a message shown in the notification bar, along with a sound to draw your attention. I highly recommend changing the default sound: It’s a “running water” effect, and I leave it to your imagination what it looks like when you’ve got the phone in your pants pocket and suddenly the reminder goes off. Awk-ward.

Carbodroid [2.1+]

Carbodroid is a much simpler app, but is very cute. You’ve got four configurable containers (you get to set the volume), and a parched Android in the background. Tap a container (to show that you just finished drinking it), and watch what happens:

Ooh, Mr. Android looks a bit less gloomy already. That’s encouraging! Let’s finish another bottle and see how our droid feels:

Much, much better. And let’s round it off with the ultimate achievement, drinking enough water for one whole day:

I’m not entirely sure about their grammar there (I “have drunk” enough water?), but the message is clear. And once we tap the Awesome button, it reveals one seriously overjoyed droid:

If only water could make me this happy in real life. The settings dialog is straightforward, and lets you set your own daily consumption goal, container volumes, and reminders:

Final Thoughts

Water Your Body is a gorgeous app, and it is definitely more full-featured than Carbodroid. You can set more containers, and the graphics are gorgeous. On a less positive note, I don’t like having it decide how much water I should drink per day, without even explaining how it arrives at that number. Carbodroid is much simpler, but it’s also cuter, at least in my opinion.

So, no clear winner here, but I do think that any of them is likely to get you to drink more water. Try them out and tell me which one works better for you!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

It’s a lot easier when you’re in your teens and twenties to keep that body up, but it’s nearly impossible once you have a house, a wife, children and a demanding job. What’s a geek to do? The same goes for women – the demands of a motherhood, a new career or a marriage can consume all of the time in the day and leave little time to maintain those curves of youth. Is it too late?

Get Back Into Weight Training & Get Your Youth Back

We’ve offered some exercise apps and tips before. Bakari shared RunKeeper for iPhone with us, and Dean covered a few sites that can keep us motivated. If you have an Android, I’m going to offer you a list of 5 Android apps that can give you the tools and the support you need to make regular weight training a part of your daily life. It’s never too late.

1. Start Your Day With Push-Ups Pro

To get started in the morning, the first thing I do to warm up for the day is push ups to get the blood flowing. Part of my efforts are going to include logging everything – so to log push-ups, you’ll want to download Push-Ups Pro.

This is one of the simplest, yet most creative exercise apps I’ve seen in a long time. Basically you lay your Android flat on the floor underneath you, and as you do pushups, you nudge the yellow circle with your nose. Each time you tap the app, it counts your push-ups for you.

Not only does the app count and log your push-up efforts, it also develops a training regimen based on your past push-up results.

Encourage Yourself With Fit Radio

The next phase of exercise for me is motivating and encouraging myself to just make it to the gym. Music motivates me. I love having time to just enjoy about 30 minutes or so of music, so having something like that to look forward to will get me there. That’s why I was pretty psyched to discover the Fit Radio app.

Fit Radio is a mobile radio station configured specifically to boost your workout routine with adrenaline-fueled music. You’ll find bass-heavy hip-hop, dance music or high-energy rock music. Whatever gets your blood flowing and your heart pounding, you’ll find it here.

Each radio station is a playlist of songs – listen straight through, or pick individual songs.

Optimize Your Reps With 1 Rep Max Calculator

There’s no sense working your tail off if you’re not going to reap the full rewards for those efforts. The way to do that is make sure that you’re pushing yourself to your full potential and your ultimate limits. 1 Rep Max Calculator will help you do that.

First, choose your optimum weight – say 25 pounds doing single arm curls. You can do 12 reps before full muscle failure. Once you enter this, the app will tell you the estimated weight for full muscle failure with one rep. This is your maximum 1-rep weight – and that’s the weight to beat.

Use the percentages tab to see how the app calculated your “effort breakdown” for a single rep – meaning, 65% of your power to lift 23 pounds a single rep.

Log Your Lifting Efforts With Fit77

So now you’re at the gym and you’re lifting nearly every day. You know your weight limits, you know your goals, so now it’s time to log your efforts so you can track your progress. The best Android app for that is called the Fit77 Lifting Log.

Using the logging app is very easy. Just select from the list of included weight-lifting exercises and enter in the weight that you used and your total reps.

Those green buttons let you tap the buttons quickly while working out without the need to type. The app also includes a full body measurement feature where you can track whatever measurements you want – weight, waste size, arm or leg size – everything.

You can track your results out over time. There’s nothing quite as motivating as watching your waste size or weight drop off in a sweet graph that looks like a ski-slope.

Get Yourself To The Gym Every Day With KeepTrack

One of the hardest things about starting a weight-training regimen is going to the gym every day. Hold yourself accountable with KeepTrack.

KeepTrack lets you track absolutely anything, but it is perfect for logging how well you stick to your daily exercise rituals. You could track cardio, weight training, or anything else.

The app will provide you with both a spreadsheet of your information as well as a graphical view of your progress. Here’s the gradual climb of cardio effort – going from 20 minutes a day to 30 minutes a day over the course of a month.

You can even add boolean items to track, like whether or not you did weight-training each day. You can see how well you’re doing by checking out the pie chart – you want to see far more “Yes” than “No”!

Fight with your stubborn laziness and make that “No” pie slice shrink down to nearly nothing.

As you can see, each app listed here offers just a little bit of help in your daily efforts to improve your health. Weight-training is a critical part of any exercise program, so make sure that you have as many tools at your disposal to succeed.

Do any of these weight training apps help with your own fitness goals? Do you use any others that you really like? Share your insight and tips in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

I am also intrigued by the other way around – devices and apps that have the ability to affect your brain. Jackson seems to be equally as intrigued as I. In 2009 he wrote a couple of cool articles covering just such apps, like his list of apps that help you sleep, relax or concentrate. His list of 9 iPhone apps that help you sleep were along the same lines as well. This week, I was complaining at work about being tired and not getting enough sleep, and one of my colleagues mentioned that I might want to consider trying binaural beats.

Improving Your Life With Binaural Beats

“Binaural what?” you ask.

That’s right, binaural beats – sounds of varying frequencies that, when played in each ear, supposedly produces a sort of “resonant frequency” in the center of the brain that can actually induce a specific mental state. The evidence for this interesting brain artifact comes from published research at the University of Florida, the University of California, and discussed in publications like the MIT Press and Scientific American.

If you want to try this phenomenon for yourself and you have an Android, you can. The goal with the apps I’m going to review in this article is to play those frequencies long enough to induce your brain toward that desired mental state.

Binaural Beats Therapy

If you’re ready to try this out, I highly suggest you first download my favorite app, Binaural Beats Therapy. This app consists of 7 preset frequency configurations that will play a carefully modulated tone in each ear, in order to produce the desired mental state that you choose in the main menu.

The display screen while the tone is playing is fairly boring – just flashing dots on the screen or the entire screen may flash different colors.

The audio itself is pretty high quality, and with this app there doesn’t seem to be any lag at all, even for audio that lasts about 2 hours.

Brainwave Tuner Lite

A similar app is Brainwave Tuner Lite, which has only three selections to choose from – one for each major “state of mind”. That includes “sleep and healing”, “meditation and relaxation” and “Focus and Learning”.

It took me a while to choose between using this one or the previous app the majority of the time that I was writing this article. I like the constant tone of Binaural Beats Therapy – Brainwave Tuner fades in and out, which I don’t particularly like. However, it does have a more creative screen while the sound is playing, which I do like.

One of the things that my colleague described to me is an iPhone app he uses to run through an entire program of frequencies. That’s really what I want to do, so I continued hunting for just such an app.

Binality

I found such an app in Binality. Like the previous two binaural beat apps, Binality offers a decent list of target mental states that you may want to pursue. These include concentration, lucid dreaming and meditation and more. Although, I’m not so sure about the “out of body experience” option…

What I really like about this app is the display while the tone is playing. It shows you the entire programmed frequency range as the program works its way through it.

You can jump around if you’d like by choosing a spot on the control bar, but I hear that you get the best results if you allow the entire program from start to finish.

edenBeats

Another interesting binaural beats app is edenBeats. It offers far fewer options as far as preset frequency tones – the menu only lists four at the moment – but the app is much more flexible because it allows you to alter each frequency as you see fit.

The tone generation screen allows you to turn off or on each base and beat frequency settings if you want to.

Best of all, you can create your own custom binaural beats from scratch if you want – and if you really know what you’re doing.

One-Use Binaural Beat Apps

There are two other apps that I should mention briefly. These are intended to be used for one particular purpose – as very targeted therapy. The first app is called Confidence Now. Be forewarned, when you first launch the app, you’ll need to download multiple large files, so try to do it while on Wi-Fi.

Confidence now offers a very long session created by certified hypnotherapist David Ridgeway, which takes you through relaxation, hypnotic induction, and the main session where Ridgeway makes hypnotic suggestions to improve your confidence, with a binaural beat in the background.

The last app is one that claims it can help people that suffer from depression, called Depression Help. This is a very simple app that just plays one preset setup of tones which the app creators claim can eventually alleviate symptoms of depression.

As to its effectiveness, I can’t really say. The comments area for the app has about half of the users saying it worked and half saying it did zilch.

So why not give binaural therapy a shot, and see if you notice any impact in your daily life. If you’re always tired, groggy or distracted, maybe one of these apps could give you the mental boost that you need. If you do give any apps a try, let us know how it works out. And if you know of any other cool Android apps similar to these, please share them in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

If you care about your weight and health even remotely, read on. As you will see, Libra will not solve all of your problems, but it makes it easier to get a clear picture of where you stand.

About Tracking Your Weight

Above is a screenshot of my own personal weight graph, extending back from May 27th, 2008. That’s over 3.5 years worth of data, more than 1,300 data points in all. That is not a screenshot from Libra: Android didn’t even exist when I started this graph. It is my own home-brew weight tracking solution. I coded the first version with AutoHotkey, and the next one with Ruby, and I use it to this day, in tandem with Libra. But the idea is certainly not my own, and it’s the same idea Libra uses.

Let’s take a closer look at how the graph works:

As you can see, there is a trend line, and dots which go over or under the line. The dots are individual data points, while the line is a moving average. Having a trend line is extremely important, as it is the only real way to see where your weight is going. The trend line is calculated according to a formula from The Hacker’s Diet, a book by John Walker, founder of Autodesk. The Hacker’s Diet is a classic reference for geeks trying to lose weight, and that’s the graphing system Libra implements.

Looking at the graph above, it is easy to see that I’ve been gaining weight over time. The lowest point on this graph is September 2009, and since then it has been going up in fits and starts. Despite all this (actually, because of it), I remain confident that graphing your weight is essential to losing it. I will tell you why later on, but first let’s look at Libra itself.

About Libra

Let’s look at the same period within Libra:

As you can see, the principle is exactly the same, only Libra adds a bunch of vital information. It knows my height, so it can tell me I am considered overweight now according to the body mass index. Overweight, by the way, is 25.0 and above – so I am just barely above normal. It also shows me I am actually gaining weight at a rapid pace, which is why it is “unknown” when I will get to my final weight goal (62.0 kg, which is about 136 lbs). I know this post would have been more dramatic if I could show you an impressive weight loss, so here is a screenshot of a real one from my past:

This is a period of several months during which I am steadily losing weight and tracking it with Libra. Note that the stats down the bottom don’t change, because they reflect the current situation and project the future.

Entering Your Weight

Every morning when I wake up, I enter my weight using the screen above. The date is automatically selected, and the tape scrolls smoothly when you flick it left or right. It’s a beautiful way to enter your weight, and it sure beats fiddling around with the keyboard. Libra lets you create a shortcut that launches you right into the “Insert value” screen, for maximum speed.

Statistics

Apart from the graph, Libra lets you see numeric stats showing your trends over various periods of time, as well as “records” of highest and lowest weight/trend values. Libra also offers a homescreen widget showing three quick stats:

Why Tracking Your Weight Is Important

Now we go back to the big question – why even do this in the first place? Well, because it is usually easy to gain weight, and it is easy to ignore the problem until it is way too late. Tracking your weight on a daily basis and graphing it is crucial, because that way you know where you stand. And as they say, knowing is half the battle.

I know some people who are overweight, and are actually afraid to know how much they weigh. But if they can’t face even that simple number, how will they be able to face the slow process of weight loss? I think that without tracking my weight, I would be much heavier right now, and would feel more hopeless about it.

Of course, once you do begin losing weight, tracking your losses is an essential part of staying motivated.

Why Tracking Your Weight Is Not Enough

Above is a period of several months when I was tracking my weight daily, but also gaining a lot of weight. So, sadly, tracking your weight may not be enough. You need to make some lifestyle changes to lose weight, as well as some public commitments. We’ve featured social fitness websites before, as well as 8 Websites That Help Couch Potatoes Take Up Running For Fitness & Fun, and I feel these are an important part of the equation. The idea is to care, and not give up.

Tracking your weight is the first step – once you take it, it may be easier to take the next one, but you will need to do something more. I’ve recently started exercising again – maybe next year I will be able to share a different-looking graph. At any case, I will probably still use Libra to plot it.

Let us know what apps and methods you use to track and lose weight.  What do you think of Libra?

I will be the first one to tell you that the ultimate solution is to spend less time at the computer. Taking a walk or looking out the window are all effective ways to relieve eye strain. Unfortunately, we can’t always get up when we feel like it and go for a stroll. It’s also hard to remember to take breaks when we’re so engrossed in our work. So how can you remember to give your eyes some relief without totally losing your train of thought in the process?

EyeDefender [Windows]

EyeDefender operates under the same principle as many eye relief web apps – break reminders – but being a desktop app, it’s harder to get away from.

The app sits in your tray, and counts down to the next break. When the time comes, you can choose from four different eye-resting activities: looking at pictures of your choosing, doing some eye exercises, activate the default screensaver or just pop up a balloon reminder (for those with excellent will power).

I find the visual training to be especially useful. The screen darkens, and you get to follow the display with your eyes and move your eyes around a bit. This works even on dual monitors, and you cannot get back to work until the break is over. A definite improvement to the constant staring at a bright screen.

Workrave [Windows & Linux]

Workrave is a nice open-source break reminder which includes reminders for micro-breaks (short), rest breaks (long) and daily limits for computer time.

You can set the breaks any way you want, and choose whether you want to have the option to skip or postpone the break. The break is simply a window letting you know of the break, but when it’s activated, you can’t use your computer until the break is over (or until you choose to skip or postpone).

During the breaks, you can get up from the computer, look away, or do some exercises the app provides in its interface.

f.lux [Windows, Mac & Linux]

If you want to relieve computer eye strain even while you work, f.lux is an excellent solution. This well-known app automatically adapts your screen brightness to the time of day, thus preventing the eye strain which comes with staring at a very bright screen in a dark room.

All you have to do is set your current location, and f.lux will automatically determine what time the sun sets and will dim your display at the right moment every day. If you’re doing color-sensitive work, you can disable f.lux for one hour. This is a great way to relieve eye-strain between your resting breaks.

Sunglasses [Chrome]

Sunglasses is a cute Chrome extension which lets you control the browser’s brightness separately from the rest of your computer.

Say you’re reading a lengthy article in Chrome, and at some point find the whole thing to be way too bright. Simply click the sunglasses icon on the top right, choose your new brightness and click save. You can now continue reading or working in a much darker and more soothing environment. This controls only your browser, so the general brightness settings will not be touched.

The extension also sports keyboard shortcuts if you’re a keyboard person. One thing I would like to see added is the option to set different brightness settings for different tabs.

Didn’t get enough? For some more break-reminder tools, check out Tina’s 3 Tools To Remind Yourself To Take A Break & Relax While Working At The Computer.

How do you get relief from long hours of staring at the screen? Any innovative methods or tools? Share in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Perhaps the most significant loss is Knol, which was Google’s attempt to create a viable Wikipedia alternative. Although it managed to acquire over 100,000 articles, it never managed to compete, and will now be seeing itself out. Users can salvage information, however, by moving it to a new WordPress-based platform called Annotum. The Knol site will go inactive on May 1st 2012, and information on Knol will still be available for download or export to Annotum until October 1st, 2012.

Google Wave, which saw a halt to development in April of 2010, is finally going the way of the dinosaurs. As of January 2012 the site will become read-only, and everything will be deleted as of April 2012.

Also on the chopping block are Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Friend Connect, Google Gears, and Google Search Timeline, all of which will be discontinued within the next few months. For details on the end dates, check out the full blog announcement. The Renewable Energy Cleaner than Coal project is to be given the halt, as well, but it likely won’t be missed since there was never a user-facing component to it.

Coincidentally, Google Health – a service whose demise was announced earlier this year – recently  sent an email reminder notifying users that it will be discontinued as of January 1st 2012, with data stored there remaining available for download until January 1st, 2013.

Source: CNET

This concern led us to set up an appointment for a hearing test. Of course, always on the look-out for new opportunities to seek out and test interesting software, I decided to strike out on the Internet to seek out a free hearing test application that would let me check my daughter’s hearing myself.

Frequency & Volume Tests With Ear Test

Now, I’m a computer geek, not a hearing specialist. So, while I did discover a pretty cool program called Ear Test to conduct the hearing analysis, it did take a little bit of reading up on hearing tests to figure out the most accurate way to do a proper test.

Ear Test is a high-quality application written by Johannes Wallroth of Berlin, Germany. It essentially provides you with a tool that you can use to vary the frequency and volume of sound in order to test the entire range of human hearing.

Please note: Never use this test with the volume turned way up and wearing earphones, as you could actually cause ear damage. Keep the earphones off, and test the sound turned down. Then put on your earphones and test starting out at the lowest volume again. Carefully increase the volumes only slightly until you can just barely hear the frequencies.

Here’s how you can give someone a hearing test using this software. First, have them sit in a chair facing in the other direction, and let them put on earphones connected to the computer.

The first thing you want to do is slide the volume down all the way to “1″, and lower the frequency all the way down as well. If your frequency step is 100 (you can go as low as 10 if you want), then your bottom frequency will be 100Hz. The best way to get started is to turn the volume down to 1, and put the frequency at about 2000 Hz. This lets the person hear a sound at a safe volume. Now, keep lowering the frequency closer to 10 Hz until the person can’t hear the sound anymore.

Select the frequency, press start, and when the person says they can hear the sound in that ear, lower the volume until they can’t hear it anymore. When they can hear it again, click the “I can hear it!” button. This places a marker at that frequency and volume in the graph at the bottom of the window. Go all the way down the scale to 100 Hz or so, and keep going down until they can’t hear the low frequency sound regardless of volume.

Next, put the volume back down to 1 or 2, and go back to where you started at 2000 Hz. Now you’re going to work your way in the other direction, into the higher frequencies. Make sure the volume is set at the lowest level that the person can hear the sound, then increase the frequency. If they can still hear it, click “I can hear it!“

If they can’t, increase the volume by one. If they still can’t, increase by 1 again. When they can hear it, click “I can hear it!” and move on to the next, higher frequency. Once you get to the top end of the frequency range, you’ll find that you have to increase the volume more in order for them to hear anything. This will show up quickly at a certain high frequency and will degrade into the situation where no matter what the volume, they can’t hear anything at all.

Wherever your slider is located at that point, that is the person’s maximum frequency threshold for their hearing.

Don’t forget to perform the test all over again for the other ear so that you have a fairly good profile of how well the person can hear in each ear. The graph below shows my own hearing test results in my left ear. I apparently can hear a bit better in my left ear than I can in my right – the drop-off occurred much earlier in the my right ear.

Once you’re finished getting your frequency/volume hearing profile using the software and you’re not sure what to make of the results, I recommend EarInfo.com as a good place to go to get started understanding your hearing profile.  The site has different charts that show you what a typical frequency/Db response looks like.

It also explains what to look for if you have “holes” in your hearing in very specific frequency ranges in that graph. What you really want to see is what my graphs look like above – the ability to hear all frequencies in the middle at a common volume level. Some people lose complete hearing of specific frequencies due to inner-ear damage, so if you see any of those in your own results, that’s all the more reason to get to the doctor quickly and have that looked at.

Give the Ear Test software a shot and let us know what you thought of the software and what you learned about your own hearing in the comments section below.

The free applications are easy enough for you to try out one by one. But  one fantastic application available which has no free trial is Baby Connect.

I investigated this top-end Android baby-monitoring application for you to help you decide if it’s the one for you. So you can get right back to looking after your baby and tracking these things the easiest way possible.

Baby Connect

Baby Connect is a paid application, but you can get a feel for how it works by signing up on the Baby Connect web interface and trying out the features there. Despite spending a few dollars (US $4.99) to purchase this application, this is by far the most feature-laden Android baby-monitoring application I have found.

For starters, the Baby Connect service is designed for multiple parents and carers to collaborate in recording the activities for each child. There’s an Android application, an iPhone application, iPad application and a web interface which all sync seamlessly between themselves.

You can record the usual eating (including food/milk types), sleeping, nappy changes, along with more interesting records such as mood, activities, milestones, location, health, growth, medicines, vaccines, photos or any other notes. The interface ensures you can view charts easily and that it’s quick to see how recently any given action has been performed.

Each user can nominate push notification alerts on their own phone for situations they want to know about immediately, such as a high temperature or reaching a milestone.

Your baby’s growth can be compared with percentiles, with preemies also compared according to birth date or due date.

Baby Connect allows you to download or regularly email your data as a .csv file in case you want to print it for your doctor or back up your records. You can even automatically Tweet your baby’s activities if you’d like to share with relatives and friends.

Using the application itself is really easy, with the most commonly used monitoring features easily accessible from the entry point available in a handy drop-down list. These can be re-organised by each user according to personal preferences, as can the most common details of the activity types. After you’ve entered in the activities, you can see a running list of updates for your baby.

Check out the Baby Connect promo video.

Free Android Baby-Monitoring Applications

If you’re just not keen to fork out money on a baby-monitoring application, there are many great free applications you can try, the best of which are What To Expect Baby Tracker, Baby Care, and Baby ESP (which has a free trial).

You may also like to check out some more websites for expecting parents, Firefox add-ons for parents, funny blogs for parents and other great articles for parents.

Have you tried Baby Connect? How does it compare to other baby-monitoring apps you’ve tried? What features are important to you?

Luckily for you guys, I’ve scored us some invite codes, which are hidden away further on down the post. So let’s check out this Fitocracy thing, starting with their own product tour!

Since Fitocracy is social, you get the oh-so familiar “news stream”, as seen on Twitter, Facebook, and just about any other social platform. Only here, the news stream is all about fitness, and includes plenty of strangers discussing fitness.

Yes, the news stream is full of people you don’t know, but Fitocracy wants you to follow some of them, just to get the hang of things. Okay, I think I’ll follow wats8976 above.

Next, Fitocracy points out my personal scoreboard:

And now I get to post my very first status update, telling the world what I’m up to. As could be expected, the concept of circles or groups is built into Fitocracy, so you can select who will get your update right when you post it:

Next, the tour switches you over to your Profile tag, and shows your own activity (of which there is none, at the moment):

And there’s also a stats view, full of zeroes at the moment:

When you start your way in Fitocracy, you’ll first be a member of the New Fitocracy Member group. You apparently need to get all the way to level 7 before you get to leave that group:

Since Fitocracy is built to let strangers meet each other, you get to “tag” yourself with physical activities you like:

Yes, I like walking for fitness. Next, the tour takes you to the Track page, where you can start logging your physical activity.

Similar to RunKeeper, Fitocracy also has some suggestions showing you what you can do, in case you don’t have any ideas:

The bar to the left contains tabs both individual exercises and complete routines. The “Routines” tab is empty at first, but the Exercises one is chock-full of exercises, and has a great live-search feature:

Each exercise comes with a complete description text description showing how to do it:

Now, let’s log my short bike ride to work.

Once you log your workout, you get a very satisfying “coach clipboard” showing how many points you’ve earned:

I assure you, this really is very satisfying.

Now, about those routines. Routines are a bunch of exercises which you usually do together. Think of them like recipes in a food-log application: Rather than log each individual ingredient in your favorite meal every time you have it, you just enter the recipe once and then log the whole meal.

Quests

To keep things interesting, you can start on a “quest”. A quest is a cute name for a fitness challenge. Here are some of the ones which are available when you’re just starting out:

You don’t exactly “enroll” on a quest. You just keep logging your activities, and as you do great feats, you will be awarded with quest completions:

But Does It Work?

In the xkcd comic’s alt text, Randall (xkcd’s creator) says:

I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high-scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I’d been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine.

That’s a lovely way to put it. I couldn’t say if Fitocracy “works” because it’s obviously a very personal thing. Not everyone will stick to an exercise routine, no matter how social you make things.  Also, Fitocracy isn’t the only game in town. There are lots of other sites that try to get you into shape. But I can definitely see how Fitocracy can become a habit.

Oh, and about those invites I promised?  Here they are! Enjoy!  But remember to come back and tell us what you think of the site.