Hardware fitness trackers are wrapped around the wrists of tech luminaries. Rumours continue to swirl about Apple’s intentions in the space. Facebook acquired Finnish fitness and activity tracker app Moves last month. The emergent quantified self/fitness tracking movement is gunning to go mainstream — and that means a whole lot more personal tracking services are going to push into what is already a crowded (and intentionally sweaty) space. Fjuul is another Finnish startup tackling activity tracking with an iOS app aiming for mainstream users. Its app (pronounced ‘fuel’) has attracted €400,000 ($550,000) in funding thus far, with investment coming from Finland’s VC Vision+ and local public funding agency, Tekes.
The startup launched v1 of its app last July to “learn and refine” — but is just now doing a full global launch with v2 of Fjuul. The app is priced at $2.99/£1.99/€2.69.
The main difference between the app and Moves is that instead of just tracking movements, such as steps, Fjuul calculates the intensity of the activity too — to help it generate an overall score (called ‘Fjuul Points’) which takes multiple types of varying activity into account.
This means users are given a single overarching metric to evaluate how much exercise they really got, rather than just approximating their fitness by measuring overall steps.
The Fjuul Points metric is fed by multiple types of locomotive activities — with the aim of making activity tracking simpler and also motivating its user by allowing different types of activities to count as exercise (and show up in the data). The app does also display steps taken and calories burned, but the focus is on Fjuul earned.
How exactly does it work?
Fjuul does not rely on additional hardware to recognize and track movements — so there’s no wearable wristband — but rather makes use of sensors already in the iPhone, coupled with its own algorithms.
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