Exercise and healthy lifestyle programs deliver lots of changes to your body. And while some are very easy to measure, like weight, others are more difficult or inconvenient. That’s where an app can be helpful. My Fiziq uses your smartphone’s camera and some smart software to measure different parts of your body. This Australian made app has been around for a close to a year and improved over that time. Here’s a look at where it’s at now.
My Fiziq uses the camera on your smartphone, to take a picture of you. It then sends that image, along with your current weight and height, to a cloud application the company has developed that is running on Amazon’s servers, to calculate chest, waist, hip and thigh measurements. When I first looked at My Fiziq about nine months ago, it required two people to use as you needed a friend to line the camera up so your body was in the silhouette it needed to fit into.
The app now works with just a single user as it can use the selfie camera on the front of your smartphone. You’ll need to prop the phone up on a table or using a tripod so that it is lined up perfectly. There’s a levelling process to follow which I found a little tricky as it was very sensitive.
For the app to work, you either need to be wearing form-fitting clothes like compression-wear or stand in your underwear or less. Then, you need to move either back or forward so your body sits in the silhouette.
The process is easy once you’ve got everything lined up. You get ten seconds from when it’s ready to start until it shoots two photos of you, one from the front and another from the side. Once the pics are in, it takes up to two minutes for the images to uploaded, the data to be processed and the results to come back.
I ran a tape measure around my body to check if the data that My Fiziq came back with was accurate. There were some small valuations – up to about 2% but depending on where, exactly, I placed the tape measure I could get closer. The problem with other tape-measure approach is that you can place it in slightly different places each time you measure with it.
My Fiziq is proving to be something of a local success story with the company signing a deal with boxer Floyd Mayweather for the company’s software to be integrated into the boxer’s “Train Like A Champ” app as well as doing a deal doing a deal to integrate into popular fitness social network Fitocracy
For a free app, My Fiziq is quite handy if you’re into measuring the effectiveness of your health and well-being regimen. But it’s lack of integration with Apple’s HealthKit (I was using it with an iPhone X) is a pain. It should be a able to get information such as my height, weight and age from there, without me re-entering it. And the process to get the camera lined up and level was a little frustrating.
That said, the app does work as expected and if you’re into using tech as part of your exercise program, then it’s a nifty addition to your digital gym bag.