My Fitness Counts
My Fitness Counts is coming soon!
Over the past couple of years we have reenvisioned the MyHeart Counts study to be more inclusive and all encompassing. We have launched our new study application called My Fitness Counts, a MyHeart Counts spinoff study. This app is now available on both iOS and Android and includes new activities that use your phone’s camera to measure heart rate and heart rate recovery, tools that are used to estimate VO2max and give a good measure of your fitness. There are also new activities that are more effective at measuring cardiovascular fitness of fitter individuals.
One of the main goals of MyFitness Counts is to develop an extensive source of data to help inform future cardiovascular health guidelines and studies, such as the revamp of MyHeart Counts that we are planning to release in 2023 on both iOS and Android platforms.
We know that My Fitness Counts is not perfect… getting this study onto Android has been more challenging than we first anticipated, yet any feedback you provide will let us fix and optimize the platform so that we can reauthor a New My Heart Counts for release on iOS and Android.
Benefits for joining My Fitness Counts:
- Learn in-depth information about your fitness
- Improve our platform for further research
- (Opt) to put your data in a biobank for other reserachers to study
- Contribute to research such as the research done in the MyHeart Counts study
- As you may know, it was a great success and several papers have been published on the data: about general findings, the results of our virtual crossover trial, and digital biobank.
Brief overview: MyHeart Counts is a smartphone-based mobile cardiovascular health research study. It will use the mobile health capabilities of smartphones and wearables to assess daily activity measures of the general public and compare these to measures of cardiovascular health - risk factors and fitness. These active tasks include a 3-minute step test, 6-minute walk test, and 12-minute run test and use the phone's camera to measure heart rate in order to assess cardiovascular fitness. Surveys administered will also assess diet, activity, and mindset measures among other things.
These can now be measured with sensors in phones or wearable devices as we have shown on iOS.
How people divide their time among exercise, sedentary behavior, and sleep all affect cardiovascular health, yet largely go unmeasured. These can now be measured with sensors in phones or wearable devices as we have shown on iOS. With the large number of smartphone users addressable with a HIPAA complaint iOS & Android platform, we aim to collect activity and cardiovascular health data on many more subjects than in prior studies as well as provide much more quantitative data on type, duration, and intensity of daily activities.
It also provides a platform to investigate methods to help participants increase heart-healthy activities. The overall goal is to develop an extensive source of data to help inform future cardiovascular health guidelines.
We hope you will download and join My Fitness Counts and contribute to research!
Follow the "More Information" link below for more information about rationale for implementing MFC, detaile desriptions of the of the technology, and protocols used in the new application.