Chew on this. Thirty million Indians are obese, 92 per cent of us do not exercise and one in five is going to die of a heart ailment. US-based wearable health and fitness solutions company, Fitbit, sounded these alarms last week while making its formal entry into the Indian market. The company has launched its entire suite of products here, along with a virtual personal training service, FitStar. This allows you to track your track activity with Fitbit devices and based on preset co-ordinates -- like heart rate, amount of calories burnt, sleep pattern, body weight – to provide personalized exercise regime programmes, aided by videos for reference.
Depending on your health goal, FitStar provides you regular video feeds on suggested workouts, lifestyle changes, diet, pretty much everything a real-life personal trainer at a health club would do. The Fitbit device measures your vital body measurements to sync up with FitStar to change your regime as your vitals improve. If you are a football fan, US footballer Tony Gonzalez’s curated fitness sessions might interest you, and closer to home, we can hope to receive recommendations soon from Fitbit India brand ambassadors Tiger Shroff, Shraddha Kapoor and Saina Nehwal.
FitStar also has a premium paid service – FitStar Premium – priced at Rs 490 a month or Rs 2,500 a year, allowing you access to unlimited HD video content from the FitStar library. One of the cool things about Fitbit is the virtual badges you procure every time you meet a goal, from something as basic as completing 10,000 steps a day to successfully climbing 10 floors in a day, or burning the recommended amount of calories in a week Considering, you can share all of these on your preferred social media channel along with video content, the asking price, is not bad, at least in comparison to what you’d pay for a real-life personal trainer.
Fitbit’s complete range of devices will be available through the coming days through retail chain stores. These devices include the high end Fitbit Surge (Rs 19,990) with GPS tracking and music integration, the Charge (Rs 9990) with sleep tracker and caller ID sync with your smart phone, the Charge HR (Rs 12,990) with real-time heart rate monitor, and the basic Fitbit Flex (Rs 6,990).
