Nautilus Brings HealthKit Integration to Exercise Equipment, Led by Bowflex Max Trainer

Tuesday November 11, 2014 2:43 pm PST by Juli Clover
Nautilus, the company behind the Bowflex line of exercise equipment, today announced that its Bowflex Max Trainer models have gained HealthKit integration, making them one of the first fitness products to support Apple's new health initiative. Support will also be coming in the near future for the company's Nautilus 616 cardio product lineup.

nautilushealthkit
With HealthKit integration, Bowflex users can now see their Bowflex workouts displayed in Apple's Health app, which is able to offer up dashboard data like calories burned, heart rate, time spent working out, and distance traveled. Data is acquired from the existing Bowflex Max Trainer app that transfers workout data from the exercise equipment using Bluetooth.

The Bowflex Max Trainer workout equipment, which starts at $999, is designed to burn more calories than competing treadmills and ellipticals, featuring 14-minute interval workouts. Nautilus's line of cardio equipment, which is gaining HealthKit support in the near future, includes a range of elliptical, treadmill, and upright and recumbent bikes.

"As one of the first fitness equipment companies to support Apple HealthKit, Nautilus, Inc. continues to lead the category by offering the latest health and fitness tools to help consumers achieve their fitness goals," said Rob Murdock, Vice President/General Manager of Nautilus, Inc. "Studies prove that digital connectivity and the ability to track progress play a critical role in keeping people motivated and engaged. We are dedicated to leveraging these tools and engaging consumers to better understand and manage their health and fitness."
Introduced alongside the iOS 8 Health app as part of a fitness and health-focused initiative, HealthKit is designed to tap into data from sensors within the iPhone and integrate with existing health and fitness apps and hardware. Information gathered from third-party apps like the Bowflex software is aggregated in the Health app to provide an overall picture of a person's activity levels.

HealthKit experienced a few hiccups when iOS 8 was first released, with Apple initially withholding HealthKit functionality from third-party apps due to a bug, but as of the iOS 8.0.2 update in September, HealthKit has been fully functional.

With HealthKit widely available to third-party developers, several fitness-related apps have begun to support the feature, including Pocket Yoga, 7 Minute Workout, CARROT Fit, and more. Several hardware products with accompanying apps have also gained HealthKit support, including the Jawbone UP and the Withings Smart Body Analyzer.

[ 39 comments ]

Top Rated Comments

(View all)

Avatar
NachoGrande
68 months ago
That's an awful lot of technology for a future coat hanger.
Rating: 26 Votes
Avatar
NutsNGum
68 months ago

Working out is 15% of health.


As someone who trains everyday I am fasinated that apple is going this route. It's not an easy task at all. Nor is it easy for an athlete.


Diet is 85% of the equation Of HEALTH!!! and I should know because I need to track my calories daily for muscle growth and recovery.


Doubtful many of my American friends who are overweight will ever be truly dedicated


-Your friendly triathlete forum member


Hey man, do you exercise or something? I wasn't totally sure after reading your post.
Rating: 9 Votes
Avatar
Radio
68 months ago
Pricey equipment

HealthKit doesn't truly address diet. Working out is 15% of health.

As someone who trains everyday I am fasinated that apple is going this route. It's not an easy task at all. Nor is it easy for an athlete.

Now take a normal American who wants to track their metrics it's going to come down to the individual.

I don't care if you wear an apple watch or track your steps all day. It doesn't mean anything if your diet is crap.

That said that's the bigger problem. Diet is 85% of the equation Of HEALTH!!! and I should know because I need to track my calories daily for muscle growth and recovery. Yes I burn a lot of calories but it means nothing if I'm not fueling properly.

My friends on myfitnesspal often stop logging in after a week or so.

My prediction - I'm sorry guys - HealthKit will be the new stocks app. Useful if you're dedicated to it or useless if you're not.

Doubtful many of my American friends who are overweight will ever be truly dedicated

-Your friendly triathlete forum member
Rating: 4 Votes
Avatar
CEmajr
68 months ago

Pricey equipment

HealthKit doesn't truly address diet. Working out is 15% of health.

As someone who trains everyday I am fasinated that apple is going this route. It's not an easy task at all. Nor is it easy for an athlete.

Now take a normal American who wants to track their metrics it's going to come down to the individual.

I don't care if you wear an apple watch or track your steps all day. It doesn't mean anything if your diet is crap.

That said that's the bigger problem. Diet is 85% of the equation Of HEALTH!!! and I should know because I need to track my calories daily for muscle growth and recovery. Yes I burn a lot of calories but it means nothing if I'm not fueling properly.

My friends on myfitnesspal often stop logging in after a week or so.

My prediction - I'm sorry guys - HealthKit will be the new stocks app. Useful if you're dedicated to it or useless if you're not.

Doubtful many of my American friends who are overweight will ever be truly dedicated

-Your friendly triathlete forum member


Apple can't address laziness, which is what many people are when it comes to Health. I use MyFitnessPal religiously to track and monitor my diet and it works great for me. Since MFP already tracks diet and syncs with HealthKit, there's nothing more for Apple to do on that front. I recently discovered that RunKeeper syncs with MFP and imports my runs into that too. Pretty amazing. Apple and third party devs can create all the tools in the world but it takes the individual to actually want to put in the effort. Most just don't care.
Rating: 3 Votes
Avatar
SusanK
68 months ago

That's an awful lot of technology for a future coat hanger.


Best post today :)
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
citi
68 months ago

Pricey equipment

HealthKit doesn't truly address diet. Working out is 15% of health.

As someone who trains everyday I am fasinated that apple is going this route. It's not an easy task at all. Nor is it easy for an athlete.

Now take a normal American who wants to track their metrics it's going to come down to the individual.

I don't care if you wear an apple watch or track your steps all day. It doesn't mean anything if your diet is crap.

That said that's the bigger problem. Diet is 85% of the equation Of HEALTH!!! and I should know because I need to track my calories daily for muscle growth and recovery. Yes I burn a lot of calories but it means nothing if I'm not fueling properly.

My friends on myfitnesspal often stop logging in after a week or so.

My prediction - I'm sorry guys - HealthKit will be the new stocks app. Useful if you're dedicated to it or useless if you're not.

Doubtful many of my American friends who are overweight will ever be truly dedicated

-Your friendly triathlete forum member


Your friends on my myfitnesspal are quitters. Get some friends with discipline. Myfitnesspal is probably the easiest app on the planet to use. They are just lazy.

What apple did was take the guess work out of the thing people do the most. Walking. It's really convenient to look at health kit and realize you just walked 5 miles. They are not trying to be all things to everyone. That what 3rd party vendors are for. If you integrate the Up app it will also track the food you input in myfitnesspal and it will tell you how healthy your diet is.
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
cb911
68 months ago
Nautilus?

Come on, how long before my dumbbells and barbells are going to be integrated?!!
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
Patriot24
68 months ago
I see HealthKit in the same light as Passbook - a tremendous amount of promise. Ultimately, it will be a few years before it is fully capable and supported.
Rating: 2 Votes
Avatar
Radio
68 months ago

I’m not sure that the real purpose of healthKit has been properly understood. I practice in the UK so don’t follow US healthcare closely but from a recent international conference I attended, the signal seemed to be that Apple is looking at either becoming a healthcare provider or acquiring one.

HealthKit is about data acquisition for Apple. Not from the healthy, who take an active interest in their health but from the unhealthy that don’t. Apple doesn’t want to know that you ran 40km last week – it wants to know that 30% of its users walked less than 500 steps/day (I’m making all this data up) and, only because they bothered to fill it in, a BMI of 32.

Perhaps you also bothered to fill in the medication list and 15% of users are found to be on blood pressure medication.

All of this can be scaled up to population level and used for actuarial analysis.

If you do happen to already be part of a service that uses a form of tele-medicine then that could feed into HealthKit. I would see the next step as being “HealthKit Server” for physicians (sync the medicine lists, blood results etc.) which would be quite attractive to hospitals etc. if on going support were guaranteed followed by Apple reviewing the data prior to making some sort of larger investment.

As I say, I’m UK based so make no judgement on whether this is a good thing or not.

Incidentally, I agree that recording exercise is meaningless without recording calorie input but I think it’s fair to assume that no one takes an active interest in logging a grossly unhealthy diet so exercise is a surrogate for “health attitude”.


well said

interesting thoughts on apple being a service provider on health data. it would absolutely be controversial because people don't like sharing that data.

thank you for sharing doc!
Rating: 1 Votes
Avatar
Takeo
68 months ago
Let me know when the Shake Weight is HealthKit enabled :P

Rating: 1 Votes

[ Read All Comments ]