What Are The Best Smartphone Apps To Help You Lose Weight?

Losing weight can be difficult, and yet everyone knows that the way to improve their wellness and wellbeing is to get to and maintain a healthy weight. As technology takes hold of all areas of our lives, it’s no surprise to find that people are using their phones more and more often to help them lose weight. There are now a number of smartphone apps on the market which are designed to help you lose weight.

 

Many of these apps are free, and the added benefit of using an app rather than simply trying to lose weight on your own steam is that it helps to maintain the interest, as well as not allowing you to be anything less than honest with yourself about how you are doing on your weight-loss regime.

 

Research supports the idea that apps help you to shed weight; a recent study carried out at Northwestern University claims that those who use mobile apps as part of their weight loss plans are likely to be able to lose around 15 pounds and, what’s more, that the weight stays off.

 

Lose It! is one such app, which features a free scanner that allows you to scan barcodes, as well as a recipe builder and a database packed with activities and food. Users can track their daily nutrients and can add food to the database.

 

MyFitnessPal is another popular app, which allows you to count calories and track your fitness. There is a barcode scanner in this one too, which quickly tells you what you need to know about a wide range of food packages, and – best of all – it is free to use.  Along similar lines, Fooducate allows you to scan foods and see what rating they have received from A to F, in terms of health value.

Categories: app, Lose, Lose weight, smartphone, smartphone apps, weight, Weight Loss

The Rhythm of Life: New App Gives Bipolar Patients Balance

Researchers at Cornell have been awarded the prestigious $100,000 Heritage Open mHealth Challenge for their smartphone app designed to assist people whose mental health has been affected by bipolar disorder. Known as “MoodRhythm”, the app has been developed for iPhone and Android phones by a team led by Tanzeem Choudhury, associate professor of computing and information science, and postdoctoral fellow Mark Matthews. But what makes it so worthy of such an illustrious prize?

 

When your wellness is affected by bipolar disorder or manic depression, your mood can swing from extreme happiness and hyperactivity to complete depression. This takes its toll on your emotional well-being, and is associated with poor functional and clinical outcomes, high suicide rates and huge societal costs. This is where MoodRhythm comes in; giving you advice on how you can maintain a regular daily rhythm, and helping your doctor to monitor your progress, based on your personalised information.

 

The app uses the microphone, light sensors and accelerometer in your phone to monitor your sleep and social patterns, and also gives you the option of reporting your daily activities, food routines and mood. The combination of all this information enables your phone to determine the situations which have positive or negative outcomes. Although the phone listens to your conversations, you don’t need to worry about your privacy as it does not listen in on the content of speech. Rather, the technology notes variations in pitch, volume, speaking rate and other characteristics which indicate different emotional states.

 

Traditionally, patients have used paper diaries which are difficult to maintain, and so Choudhury collaborated with patients and clinicians to develop a more usable app. According to Choudhury, ‘It is one of the greatest challenges in health care to develop cutting-edge technology that not only meets clinical needs but that can be incorporated with ease into patients’ lives.’ So why choose rhythms?  ‘Rhythms guide our lives,’ Choudhury explains. ‘Our biological clocks tell us when we need to sleep, eat and wake. When these rhythms are interrupted or obstructed, it can be difficult for our bodies to get what they need to stay healthy and balanced.’

Categories: app, bipolar disorder, choudhury, Information, MoodRhythm, Patients, rhythms

Company Makes a Corporate Wellness Programme Great Fun

Keas is a small company in San Francisco that has put employee wellness and wellbeing at the heart of their organisation. This health tech startup company has produced a unique way for companies to boost employee health and productivity through a social service, and have turned over $26 million so far.

With corporate wellness being an increasingly important issue, the company has been founded by the previous head of Google Health, in an attempt to provide a health service that is centred around the idea of keeping healthy within the workplace.

In just one year, the company has doubled its number of registered users and has now raised additional funding which it aims to use to bring the service to an increased number of clients as well as producing new products to add to their portfolio.

Their aim is to make health a social and engaging issue for employees, and this is done through company-wide incentives where employees are encouraged to take their own wellness seriously and to help make changes to improve their lives. Set up as a workplace social network, the platform allows HR departments to keep employees in touch with schemes such as flu shots and other health initiatives, and employees themselves can also share updates in a social way about their wellness, such as their daily exercise or what they are going to be eating that day.

Employees are also divided into teams and the peer pressure is then useful in nudging them towards their health goals as they don’t want to let the team down.

Keas says that employees engage with the site on average 12 times per month, and user engagement is high. Keas can also be accessed through mobile phones, making it easier for employees to engage with the programme, and it also links in with other popular aps such as Runkeeper, LabCorp and Fitbit to help improve the employees’ wellness.

Categories: app, Corporate, Wellness

Meet Earth Dog: The Superhero Whose Foe is Climate Change

Environmental superhero, Earth Dog is outdoing himself by readying a new book to help families conserve energy and give their children a cleaner planet. In order to give your environmental wellness a boost, Earth Dog’s new book, Earth Dog’s Environmental Guide to Saving You Money and Preventing Climate Change, provides important information provided the EPA.

Earth Dog’s Environmental Guide is a practical guide for the whole family, and everybody who cares about conserving energy at home to save money and the planet’s wellbeing. Given that recent extreme weather events, particularly in the US – such as a historic Midwestern drought, massive East Coast storms like Sandy, brutal heat waves, and widespread wildfires in Western states – have raised questions about climate change, Earth Dog’s environmental message can’t come fast enough!

Now available on Amazon, Earth Dog’s new book is the sequel to The Earth Dog Story, which launched the canine superhero’s quest to save the planet. The new Earth Dog guide is a valuable educational tool to help with the fight against climate change, as more and more young readers are turning to e-books. According to recent reports, e-book readership now surpasses that of traditional books, and young readers are leading the revolution.

Earth Dog himself is an environmental superhero who educates young people around the world about environmental issues affecting their planet. However, not only does Earth Dog help to raise young peoples’ awareness about ecological problems that they and future generations will face, he also, through understanding and cooperation, teaches your children the problem-solving skills they need if the environment is a top concern.

First published as a storybook in 1992, and then in 1996 in cooperation with the US Department of Energy as a part of its Environmental Out Reach Program with Weekly Reader, The Earth Dog Story has helped a generation of young people to learn and care about environmental issues. However, the popular children’s environmental superhero is now making his comeback, and he’s got his eye on children of all ages. Aside from his two e-books, Earth Dog has spawned a new line of promotional products available on the new Earth Dog online store http://earthdog.org/store/, as well as an Earth Dog® app on iTunes.

Meet Earth Dog: The Superhero Whose Foe is Climate Change

Categories: app, book, Earth Dog

Do IT Companies Need To Re-think Productivity?

Giant American company Yahoo recently announced that they were no longer allowing people to work from home. This change in policy has been ascribed to people not getting their work done while they are working remotely. And it is a growing trend – companies are becoming increasingly intolerant of any potential time being spent away from doing work.

A large number of companies that have banned all games and applications from corporate-provisioned devices, as well as social apps like Facebook, Twitter and Pintrest. This is especially true of IT companies. The problem is that now IT has become all about productivity. Indeed, in large organisations, IT is often the driving force behind keeping people productive.

Although productivity policing isn’t an issue of technology, IT does have technology tools that make it easier to implement policies of keeping devices free from unwanted programmes. You can blacklist apps entirely, sometimes by category and sometimes simply by name. But the real issue is that companies no longer trust their employees.

There is nothing wrong with trying to protect your users from the problems of malicious apps, malware, and spyware. It’s good practice for any company. But there’s no doubt it needs to be part of any company’s culture that people take responsibility for their own actions. Often we know our minds, and if a couple of moments of browsing Twitter as a quick break allows you to re-focus, then it can definitely be a good thing.

It should be possible to harness people using apps as a good thing. Make it a part of the working schedule – social media often brings news and new ideas forward. There is no need for IT to over-police productivity.

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Do IT Companies Need To Re-think Productivity?

Categories: app, productivity, Yahoo

How To De-stress At Work Without Leaving The Desk

Smartphones are often given a bad name as it is suggested that they only make us more stressed. Fortunately there are a number of apps you can download that will keep your stress levels low.

Keep essential oils at your desk

Essential oils can help you relax – they mimic the atmosphere of a spa at your desk. Aromatherapy has been shown in a number of studies to help you de-stress, so shop around for an oil that you like the smell of and you’ll be on the road to relaxation.                                                                                                                                                  

Keep a handwritten to-do list

It’s well known that writing with your hand can be very therapeutic if you’ve been typing for a long time. Also, keeping your list on a pad instead of the computer means that you can take it with you when you leave your desk and can keep you away from the distractions of the internet. The act of writing a list by hand also makes you more able to remember it.

Have an orange for a snack

Many people enjoy a snack at work, and it’s always best to choose something healthy and nutritious. The orange could be the perfect option as it is filled with vitamin C, and vitamin C is the perfect nutrient to help you bounce back from a stressful situation.

Take a break from the screen

One of the problems with working on a computer is that you’re staring a screen all day. Whilst ergonomics have made things better, it can be quite stressful finding yourself in the same position staring at a glaring screen hour after hour. Take a quick break away from the screen and your eyes will thank you for it.

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How To De-stress At Work Without Leaving The Desk

Categories: app, vitamin c, workplace stress

Kinsey Reporter: Free Application on Sexual Behaviour

Citizen observers around the world use free applications now available for Apple and Android mobile platforms to not only report on sexual behaviour and experiences, but also to share, explore and visualise the accumulated data.

People are natural observers. It’s part of being social, and using mobile applications is an excellent way to involve citizen scientists.  New insights into sexuality and relationships today are available.  Also, Information like what do people notice, what are they involved in, and what they can relate to us about their lives and their communities will be available.

Development of the citizen reporting platform is an opportunity to gather information on important issues that may have been difficult to examine in the past.

This new platform will allow to explore issues that have been challenging to study until now, such as the prevalence of unreported sexual violence in different parts of the world, or the correlation between various sexual practices like condom use, for example, and the cultural, political, religious or health contexts in particular geographical areas.

Users simply download the free app and begin contributing observed information on topics such as sexual activity, public displays of affection, flirting, unwanted experiences and birth control use. Even though no information identifying users submitting reports is collected or stored, the time and general location of the report is collected and input into the database. Users also have the option of selecting their own geographic preference for the report by choosing city/town, state/region or country.

Surveys will change over time, and users can view aggregated reports by geographic region via interactive maps, timelines or charts. All of these reporting venues can be manipulated with filters that remove or add data based on specific survey topics and questions selected by the user.

The sensitive domain — sexual relations — added an intriguing challenge in finding a way to share useful data with the community while protecting the privacy and anonymity of the reporting volunteers, they added.

The protections and anonymity provided to those responding to surveys allowed IU’s Institutional Review Board to classify the research as “exempt from review,” which allows the data to be used for research and shared without requiring informed consent from users of the apps.

Apps are available for free download at both the Apple iOS and Android app stores. Accompanying the app release are a Kinsey Reporter website, a Twitter feed and a Facebook page. The four resources also provide links to information about sexuality, such as blogs and podcasts from the Kinsey Confidential website. YouTube videos on “What Is the Kinsey Reporter App” and “Making the Kinsey Reporter App” are also available for viewing.

Kinsey Reporter: Free Application on Sexual Behaviour

Categories: app, behaviour, sexual