By Lee Rickwood
Here’s a chance to feel good in a couple of different ways.
A newly released mobile media app not only offers support and advice for improving your health and fitness, it also links your exercise habits to fundraising activities and notable international charities.
SoFit is a new mobile app that combines social media and fitness
Released as the 2012 London Olympic Games are underway, drawing the attention of billions around the world, the new SoFit app is known as the Official Solution Provider for ‘Walk a Mile’, a global tolerance campaign supported at 2012 London that promotes social fitness and unity under the umbrella Hours Against Hate.
SoFit is one of a number of new so-called mobile health, or mHealth, tools that can address everything from general health and fitness to specific medical conditions and illnesses.
SoFit is a mobile social gaming platform that lets you get fit, stay fit and earn rewards that matter. SoFit seamlessly blends healthy competition, exercise, rewards and charitable donations.
SoFit brings together on and offline environments to empower individuals to improve their health and fitness by integrating mobile app and complementary wireless devices that fuse the on and offline worlds.
The app is now available for iPhone and Android in the respective app stores.
In order to keep participation, excitement and enticement high, every time a user works out with SoFit and an online Buddy, they are credited with points that they can submit for a chance to win a sweepstakes prize package as well as increasing their ability to receive even more rewards.
Rewards are delivered through SoFit’s partner, Kiip. PayPal will provide payment processing for all donations.
User share their work-outs and fitness activities with their social networks, but they can also compete. You can choose to race other SoFit Buddies in a variety of distances through the app. Showing up as their own avatar on the ‘Race’ screen, SoFit Buddies can track their progress in the race and see how others are doing.
“An integral part of the SoFit app is its ability to use GPS to track human movement, not yet a perfected method,” described Marc Askenasi, President & CEO of InterAmerican Gaming Inc. (IAG), a Toronto-based digital technology company that develops socially disruptive technologies. “The (development) team’s challenge was to find a way to track walking and running distances in dense, urban landscapes, where long linear movements are not always possible. By creating its own location manager, the team achieved high level of accuracy to track the user’s movements while using the app.”
IAG worked closely with Xtreme Labs on the app. With offices in Toronto and California, Xtreme Labs has previously worked with Groupon, Virgin Mobile, and Life Fitness.
SoFit seamlessly blends healthy competition, exercise, rewards and charitable donations.
Xtreme Labs was tasked with bringing together fitness, gamification, social interaction and charitable donation functionality in the app. It’s been developed natively for the Android and iOS platforms and the user interface and experience went through several iterations, the developers describe, in order to find the best way to let users to track their friends.
The SoFit app is updated each day to accurately display your progress.
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submitted by Lee Rickwood
