Human Revamps Tracking System For Its Fitness Monitoring App

Human is a slickly designed fitness tracking app that works without any hardware devices. You just launch the app, set it up and you’re all done. Launched in September, the app received its first major update.

“First and foremost, the update is a massive upgrade to our tracking system,” co-founder and CEO Renato Valdés Olmos told me. “Apart from improved accuracy and battery life, Human now also tracks indoor and stationary activity, as long as you have your phone on you.”

At heart, Human remains a passive iOS app designed to help you stay healthy. The goal is to move for 30 minutes every day, and to keep up with this simple habit. The company calls it the ‘Daily 30′. As it is extremely simple, keeping up with Human is easier than with competitive fitness systems.

After setting up the app, you can forget about it. Whenever you reach the goal, you get a push notification alerting you that you are staying healthy today — it’s as simple as that.

But there was a flaw. Until today, only outdoor activities were tracked. You could dance all night long without reaching the Daily 30. Now, Human tracks indoor activities and adds them to your Daily 30. You don’t need an iPhone 5S, as long as you have an iPhone 4S and up, you are good to go.

Other refinements came with the update as well. There are a few more stats now, you can see your streak and get badges. And of course, you can still tap on the big number to get more details about your activities. For example, as Human works with the phone’s GPS, you can even see where you ran last night.

While Human is much simpler than Fitbit and others, it all comes down to staying healthy — and it actually works. “The metric we’re really proud of however is qualitative,” Valdés Olmos said. “Humans move 40 percent more 6 weeks after downloading the app, a steady habit change.”

The next step for Human is to go beyond the Daily 30. You can reward users for some activities for example, and Human users should see that in future updates. As long as the emphasis remains on design and simplicity, the app will still be different enough to convince casual fitness app users.