I bought myself a Body Media On Body Monitoring System. It seems to work really well and I got a good deal on Amazon. It was under a hundred bucks.
This is less about what is great about Body Media and more about what they need to improve.
- My confidence in the step counter. I switched the iOS app to workout mode and walked around my house while it the app and armband were communicating. The updates weren't realtime, instead it looks like they were batched. It wasn't clear to me whether it was working properly. You should provide some notification in the UI that explains this. Not something overt like a pop up message but instead integrate the behavior in the UI elements.
- The calorie intake. No one does this well, your setup is especially bad. If I can't easily log what I've eaten I'm not likely to use the tool.
- In an ideal world, I'd like to be able to take a picture of a nutrition label and the software would OCR the data. These labels are standardized so this doesn't seem like a hard problem.
- In a less than ideal world, take a picture of the label, upload it to you and display your form and label side by side to make data entry easier.
- Do you store items that are manually entered by users in your database for public use? It feels like this should be shared pain. It will help improve the database.
