Last week I posted a brief review on the KiFit/Ki Performance System and oddly since doing that I noticed its appearance in a TV program we watch.

One morning, having had to get up early for the BT engineer i flicked through Anytime on my tv and was presented with a title that I could hardly refuse “The Biggest Loser USA”. I didn’t know what to expect but 40mins I was hooked, now on its 8th series (in the UK), the show follows a group of excessively overweight people and forces them into training regimes with a weekly weigh off at the end. The guys on this program drop some huge amounts of weight over a small number of week but the show focuses predominantly on exercise.

Anyway on the arm of all the contestants was a band which when after a bit of google turned up the bodybugg or as we know it in the UK the KIFit. Would be great to see the contestants logins – that would be some seriously interesting reading! Now all they need to do is bring it to an English medium in the same capacity and I’m sure they will get interest!

About a month ago in Runners World mag I saw an advertorial for a new style “body monitor”. I have always been one for gadgets when i’m keeping fit and for anyone that has followed my blogs on and off they will have seen reviews for nike+ kits and are possibly also aware that I now run with a garmin watch which I extract feeds for to show pretty maps on myself. So with that in mind I got in touch with the KiFit guys to see if they had any interface and API available which would make there site a lot more appealing to me by the fact I could extract information and show you what I was eating, doing etc on my blog…

About the same time last year I contacted a similar (cue comments about the tech’s not being similar) organization called MiCoach (I believe) who offered no facility to access data either and weren’t really prepared to talk to me with my techy hat on, however, the people at KiFit seemed a lot more responsive offering me a bit of a demo and also a demo account on there site to see if I could extract what I wanted and whether getting on the device would interest me.

A few days ago over the phone I had a chat with one of the chaps who worked with KiFit and we poked around the system, the user interface seems well constructed and very user friendly. The UI came as a bit of a surprised to me, it felt very polished (however after a bit of digging the Activity Mgr System looks like it has been around for a little bit longer than KiPerformance) and obvious. When you log in you are presented with a very shiny interface that shows your day stats pulling information from an armband you are supposed to wear 24/7 which measure motion, skin response, skin temp, heat flux and steps.

For me, one of the interesting displays is that relating to sleep patterns, something that always intrigues me. Sometimes I wonder whether I have had a bad run because of a poor night sleep or whether it is just another one of those “runners excuses”…

This device can tell whether you are reaching deep sleep and how often you stir during the night. On top of this there are some nicety, how much physical activity your are doing each day is nice and considering this is supposedly on you all the time it measures everything which extends what the Garmin does (plus the Garmins battery life is shocking so would only last half a day!)

Click for larger display

The online platform integrates in your daily food eating patterns which is pretty cool, but whether I would have the will power to store this every day would be interesting, the tool doesn’t quite seem invasive enough to force you to do it – with something that has to be done almost daily you have to have a lot of will power to maintain this. It would be interesting to see whether there stats show peoples inclination to insert dietary data dwindles as time progresses?

Anyway, after a few hours poking around at the UI am I interested? At the moment I would say yes, however, the biggest niggle I have for this device is cost. You can’t use the device without a subscription and you pay a monthly fee for the privilege. Whilst the monthly fee won’t break the bank alone couple this with a gym membership etc and the costs still escalate. Also once you have purchased the device who is to say that the website will still be up and working in 6months time or a new OS come out that renders the device inoperable. I actually think that it would make sense to have both an offline and online system. Garmin have a similar model, sure there offline app is pants but you still have that facility – plus with companies such as Garmin, Nike, Nokia (to an extent) who offer online exercise management tools I think you can rest assured a little bit due to the shear size of the corporation backing it, i’m not so sure about the KiFit, although I would like to be proved wrong…

I will hopefully be granted a little more time to play and poke before my trial account gets revoked – I love the system and if I could extend my running data with all this information there would be a statistics overload on this blog and perhaps I could possibly move to the next stages of health and fitness which is watching the diet.

It gets an initial thumbs up from me except for the monthly subscription costs, I think anyone serious about training either over a long period or up to an upcoming event could seriously benefit from this online diary. I suspect if I used this during my next 12 weeks of marathon training I would have some pretty awesome data on the system…Oh and yes, I managed to get data from there site in order to put on my blog – well I’m half way there, can log on, extract data now just creating the code to display it in a nice way…

If you missed the link at the top of the article you can visit the KiPerformance site here. Anyway – back to running I go…

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(n.b. I should prob point out I haven’t actually got to use one of these devices or seen what they physically look like I have only had access to the website and sales talk.)

Having promised a review of all of the technology I run with for some time I have finally decided to pull my finger out and actually do it. It seems fairly obvious to review my Nike+ device first as it is one of the first gadgets I really purchased to use whilst running and I am still using it. At a later point I will create a subsequent review of my Garmin Forerunner watch should anyone want to know about that!

In about Feb ‘08 I started running, I’m sure most thought it was a whim, a passing fad. However, for my birthday I asked for an Ipod Nano and whilst in the States I picked up one of the nike+ widgets. Darren,  a colleague from work already had one of these so I’d half seen it in action and was eager to get out with it (judging by my archive I went out 3 days after getting it!)

Before you begin (hidden not so obvious extras!)

So you have purchased the nike+ kit and are eager to get out and run, well hold your horses. Unless you have special nike+ trainers which have a little hole cut into the sole to house the dongle you are going to have to either make or buy a ‘holster’ to attach to your laces. You can pick one of these up from ebay pretty cheaply – I have only used this one so can’t really review it but there are certainly others on the market. The dongle slides into the holder and then the holder is attached firmly to the laces. The device I have has a pivot hinge which allows the holder to be easily removed from the trainers unlike some which are weaved into the laces, this mechanism has its obvious pro’s and cons the later being the device can come lose/break off which has happened to me once so far resulting in needed to purchase a new kit.

Lets Run…

Ok so once you have got the little dongle in place and you have placed the widget into your ipod (if you have an old school ipod) you should see an option on the menu screen that says ‘Nike+ Ipod’ from this point the submenu’s should all be fairly self explanatory. Chose the run type you want to do, chose your playlist and away you go, once you have finished tap a button on your ipod and plug it into your computer.

Itunes will now do the rest of the work for you – syncing your data with the nikeplus servers which has a nice little portal to track your runs, see how others are doing etc. As the system has no concept of gps don’t expect masses of data but its a nice little automated online diary.

The Results

As the nike+ is just a glorified pedometer the distances and speeds mentioned should not be taken as completely accurate. Once calibrated they suggest to take a 10% margin of error, if you want almost 100% accuracy you will need to look at one of the gps devices out there which tend to be more expensive. If you want a relatively inexpensive first device i’d suggest looking into these. The Nike+ website is really nice and clearly a lot of thought has been put into its design and usability.

Verdict

I tend to recommend this device to all new runners, however, with iPhones apps and nokia phones starting to offer gps mapping perhaps the end is insight for the current Nike+ so who knows! If you have an ipod/iphone already goto the apple store and get the dongle for like £10 and your pretty much good to go…