IBM and Under Armour have created an app that the companies hope has the potential to revolutionize the health and fitness industry.
They demoed it during IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's keynote speech at CES on Wednesday, when Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank joined her on stage.
UA has put IBM's supersmart computer, Watson, inside its new fitness/health-tracking app, "Record."
Record is an app that the companies say will track and analyze your workouts, sleep data, and nutrition, taking info from fitness trackers, smartwatches, third-party apps, from data you enter into it, or that you enter into UA's other popular fitness apps like MyFitnessPal or UA's MapMyFitness apps.
UA and IBM say that Watson will look at all that data and serve up personal nutrition and training advice. It will base its coaching on the results of other people who have similar health/fitness profiles, as well as data pulled from things like nutritional databases, physiological, and behavioral data.
In a press release, IBM explains it like this:
A 32-year-old woman who is training for a 5K race could use the app to create a personalized training and meal plan based on her size, goals, lifestyle. The app could map routes near her home/office, taking into account the weather and time of day. It can watch what she eats and offer suggestions on how to improve her diet to improve performance.
Between trackers, apps, and information data generated by health/sports researchers, there's a massive amount of fitness data in the world. UA, with Watson, wants to take all that data and turn it into insights for each individual person.
That's an amazing goal, and if the app works as advertised, it's one that could change how you think about your sport, your body, and your fitness tech forever.
