There’s now a fitness tracker for people in wheelchairs
Chaotic Moon
Whether you choose the Fitbit, Garmin, Jawbone or the fancy, new Apple watch, there are plenty of ways to track your movement. That is, as long as you’re using your legs.
Tyler Hively is a content strategist at Chaotic Moon, a software engineering company out of Austin, Texas. He’s also in a wheelchair. After chatting with his sister – who also happens to be an occupational therapist – about the popularity of fitness trackers they realized that there wasn’t a tracker on the market for wheelchair users. Hively decided to pitch the idea to his company and Freewheel was born.
Freewheel was created by a team of hardware and software developers who worked in consultation with an interaction designer and Hively.
Using a device that is attached to the wheelchair, the tracker can measure speed, acceleration, distance, altitude, incline and decline. Bluetooth technology then aggregates that info into an app much like many other fitness trackers on the market. To capture heart rate, a wearable device like a smart watch can be used to feed data into the app.
“Freewheel’s potential is limitless,” Chaotic Moon CEO Ben Lamm says on the company’s website, “and we envision the project developing into a global platform with future applications we haven’t yet imagined.”
Though an exact release date has not been announced, Digital Trends reported that patents were in order and after a few more tweaks over the next few months, the company plans to release Freewheel globally.
