HeartRate Games' objective is to speed the pace of fitness games innovation by giving developers a set of technology tools that make it easier to create great products combining fitness games with the proven benefits of cardio exercise machines. Fitness games have generated high consumer demand and offer tremendous potential for helping consumers fight obesity. Only a handful of new fitness game products will make it to market during 2009, however. A major impediment to innovation is the high cost of fitness games development. Because fitness game solutions require both hardware devices and game software, new product development costs run $10-20 million. The technology infrastructure supporting fitness games development is in need of major advancement. Technology tools are needed to simplify and lower the cost of fitness games development, thus opening the door to thousands of independent product developers who are currently priced out of the market. Similar technology tools, placed into the hands of independent developers, have unleashed a wave of software innovation with Apple's iPhone and Facebook, whose users now have access to 65,000 and 57,000 software applications respectively. A development effort on this scale will be needed if fitness games are to make a permanent dent in global obesity and related chronic diseases. HeartRate Games' objective is to build a fitness games technology platform that will radically reduce the cost of development and foster unprecedented collaboration between developers of fitness games and web applications, cardio hardware device manufacturers, and researchers in obesity and exercise. These groups currently have no easy means to collaborate on new product innovation. The Phase I project aim is to design, prototype, and test a system architecture and platform components that use cardio exercise data in games and web applications such as a Facebook fitness tracking program. Phase II will involve development of the platform components. Phase III will see the marketing of a developer's kit to development participants and the launch of a developer's community that will encourage professional networking and collaboration to spark fitness games innovation.
Public Health Relevance: Consumers love fitness video games. If fitness games can be made that consistently lure consumers into more frequent, calorie-burning, and ergonomic exercise, the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide can be prolonged and made healthier.
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