Adventures by Nic Series
Although I’ve been back from the SXSW conference that was held in Austin for a few weeks now, I’m still keyed-up from all of the energy around our product at the show and from the increased interest in technology healthcare solutions among the tech community.
Now we all know that Austin is known for its great music and tasty BBQ, but for the week of SXSW Interactive, it’s all about technology and social media. This was the first official year that healthcare was a track at the show. So, as leaders in the health and wellness body monitoring space, we had to shake things up and build upon our data API kickoff from the SXSW show last year.
Some might think a BodyMedia marketing team member might be out of place among all of these tech gurus at the party, oops, I mean conference. Well, not when I’m hooking people up with free product, literally, in return for making them do crazy stuff.
During the conference we hosted the “Work Your App Off” contest. The contest featured twenty influential members of the tech community who wore the BodyMedia FIT LINK Armband throughout the conference and competed for the titles of Craziest with the highest level activity and then the other side of the coin, Laziest with the least amount of activity, STEPPrimacy (most steps), and Insomniac (least sleep).The challengers used an upcoming Bluetooth upload feature to send real-time BodyMedia FIT data from the mobile application to the cloud server- so we could see their progress, or lack of it, in real-time online.
We then developed a custom application using our open data API – a leader board Facebook application that showed each challengers’ progress in real-time for each category. We showcased the app in the Circus Mashimus Lounge in the Austin Convention Center with our API partner, Mashery, and on the Pepsi jumbo-tron. The contest brought a lot of exposure to our API among attendees as people closely monitored the progress of participants and saw firsthand some of the cool things developers can create using health and fitness data.
The board helped to illustrate and highlight some recent updates to the API that includes a faster, more interactive iteration for different categorizations of the data. The real-time experiment proved endless opportunities can be created with the combination of BodyMedia data, our open API, and the technology. It also provided a great backdrop for all of the discussions about the world of health colliding with technology.
By bringing to life a real-time application of the API, we had a lot of great interest in the API among developers and we are excited about future collaborations with these developers to expand the uses for BodyMedia data. You can find more information about our data API at developer.bodymedia.com
The passion for our product at SXSW was energizing and until my next adventure, I will look forward to seeing some of the applications that come from participants at the show, oh and let me know if anyone has an idea of where we should adventure to next!
Categories: General.
