wa news today: Nike wants to give you fuel for your every move

Catherine de Lange, contributor

(Image: Bartholomew Cooke/Nike)

Time is running out. It?s nearly midnight, and I?m pacing up and down the platform of the subway station, anxiously looking at my wristwatch. At 12 o?clock, my time will be up. OK, so I?m hardly Cinderella, and my carriage may not turn into a pumpkin, but if I don?t clock up a few hundred more steps before the stroke of 12, I?m not going to meet my daily fuel target, and my personal best will go down the pan.

If you have no idea what I?m talking about, let me rewind. This strange obsession started a few weeks ago after a hedonic weekend at the Secret Garden Party festival in Huntingdon, UK. On Sunday morning I decided to take a breather from festivities and kick back in the Secret Forum tent, host to all manner of talks and offbeat entertainment.

I sat there half dozing behind my sunglasses for a while, as one speaker rolled into the next. Then a trendy-looking young man hopped onto the stage and introduced himself as James Kennedy, a trend analyst from a firm called The Future Laboratory.

Kennedy had come to talk to us about a new trend that he was convinced was going to be huge. In fact, he said, while most trends come and go, this one would only keep getting bigger. What was he so excited about? Self-quantification - the idea of constantly monitoring yourself.

Kennedy began with the story of Seth Roberts, one of the early adopters of this practice. Roberts, who is professor of psychology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley would make painstakingly accurate observations about himself every day, several times a day, looking for trends. For example, he found that eating butter in the morning made him better at arithmetic tests in the afternoon. He would use gadgets and tests to measure his sleep patterns, his dietary intake, his exercise, and so on.

I personally wouldn?t have the patience to carry out all these laborious measurements, but as Kennedy explained, this concept is now being brought to the mainstream thanks to mobile gadgets and smartphone apps. I?d already tested some of these - for a few weeks I found it fun to monitor my sleep patterns using the sleep cycle app, and I?ve been using the Nike + running app to monitor my running progress and to see how other factors, like the weather or the day of the week, might be affecting my performance. These gadgets were fun, when I was thinking about them, but I always thought it would be great to have some sort of electronic device that measures your overall activity, all the time.

So I was intrigued to hear Kennedy introduce the next gadget in what he sees as an unstoppable revolution - the Nike+ FuelBand. It looks like a rubber bracelet, but the idea is that this innocuous device counts the activity from everything you do, whether that?s walking up the escalator or brushing your teeth.

Wear the Nike FuelBand and you can be just a little bit like Serena Williams (Image: Getty Images for Nike)

I left the forum tent wondering how the system works and whether it might help me return to a more healthy state of being after my time at the festival. So I got in touch with Nike and asked if I could test it out. Could such a simple-sounding device actually offer much more than a pedometer?

Unlike many other sports training devices, this gadget is about overall activity, not really hardcore training. The band uses a triaxial accelerometer to measure arm movements, so that it can, for instance, calculate the number of paces you take and work out whether you are running or walking. Unlike a normal pedometer, however, the team at Nike analysed the movements involved in a range of different activities, which the band can identify - such as dancing or playing basketball. It then uses an algorithm to convert that activity into a currency called fuel. Running gives you more fuel than walking.

Fuel is what Nike uses to give you feedback on your activity, rather than using, say calories. You set a daily target - mine is 3000 - and as you get closer to reaching your goal, you can see the progress as a row of 20 LEDs changes from red to green on the band. The advantage of using a different type of currency to measure activity is that it?s a level playing field across sports and individuals. A heavier person will burn more calories when running than a lighter person, for instance, but with fuel, it?s about moving, regardless of these other factors. The system recommends 2000 fuel points as an inactive day, 3000 as an active day and 5000 as a day when you?d go to the gym or something, but I found that I?ll easily cover 3000 just on a normal day, going to work, without any strenuous activity. If I go for a run, I?ll top 5000, and get lots of exciting feedback when I plug it in.

One major limitation is that there are some sports which can?t add to your fuel. Swimming, because the band isn?t waterproof, and cycling, because you need to be moving your arms for it to measure what you?re doing. And I found the band to be really uncomfortable under my boxing gloves - in the end I caved in and took it off. The other niggle I have with the band is that it?s impossible to know just how many different movements it can analyse. Would it know I am doing a star jump for example, or might it just interpret that as waving an arm around? Regardless, it does seem to respond quite reasonably to the level of exertion I put myself through on a day-to-day basis.

After using the bracelet for a couple of days, I found it strangely addictive. Just wearing the device compels you to take the stairs or walk, even clean the floor - all those things we know we should do but seem like a chore. It?s all about gamification, and the fact that the bracelet links with the iPhone app via Bluetooth and visualises your activity using neat interfaces only adds to the fun - and the challenge, which is why I cared enough to want to keep my personal best going before the counter automatically resets at midnight. Because the fuel currency is universal too, it means you can link up and compare with friends.

Kennedy argues that we are all striving to improve ourselves, which is what makes this kind of tech so compelling. Whether or not the widget will get boring, ask me later. But for now, you?ll have to excuse me, I have some fuel to burn.

Read more: "Quantify thyself: Tracking your life from food to mood "