You don’t have any more excuses to be lazy nowadays, by starting to improve your lifestyle using Augmented Reality. New technologies have always been seen as enemies of the healthy lifestyle, since they’ve always been perceived as something static, impossibile to use if not sat still on a chair or a sofa, in front of a computer, a laptop or a smartphone. Well, things have changed by now. Today, new technologies have learned to live among the most active men and women, moreover, they help them stay fit, active and improve their general mental and physical health. Researchers have now stated that this relationship between fitness/wellbeing and technology is to be considered more possible thanks to immersive technologies, which have the potential to add more value, sense of experience and motivation to the standard ways of keeping a healthy lifestyle.
What do we mean by improve one’s lifestyle with AR?
Following a healthy lifestyle is not alway as easy as we think. The common conception of “healthy lifestyle” means trying to be less sedentary as you can, avoiding junk food and fats, practicing mindfulness or some kind of meditation and, well, taking time to relax and enjoy life.
Using Augmented Reality, some (if not all) of these aspects can result in easier to follow, more accessible and even more convenient. Moreover, thanks to new technologies, you appear to have more control over your work on having a healthy lifestyle, because there is anyone else than you checking on your improvements, appointments, meals and so on… everything is manageable following your personal timing and schedules.
Staying fit with AR
Your gym wherever you go
In order to have a healthy lifestyle, being able to have a fitness routine is something almost mandatory. Sometimes though, keeping a fitness routine might appear more difficult than we think. For instance, as we know, a lot of jobs require several hours a day to sit on a chair, so that after 8 hours of work, we might not feel exactly in the mood for going to the gym. And here’s the part where Augmented Reality comes to save your day: what if you don’t need to “go” to the gym, but all you need is AR/VR equipment that brings the gym to you? This might be the first and one of the most important aspects of AR helping you improve your lifestyle .
The variety of sports and ways to do it using AR is impressive and it is totally up to you. By using smart equipment, headsets, or smartphones, doing sports has never been easier and funnier. By buying an AR device, you can recreate the environment of a gym at your own place, you could also have your personal trainer, and sometimes even talk with other people “in the same gym” so that the relational part of the gym remains existent. Moreover, having your gym at home means that you don’t need to respect your gym time-schedule, so that if you want to do your workout at midnight, you are more than free to do it (only make sure not to be too loud and let your neighbors sleep). Your personal trainer will be there, at any time, waiting for you, in your virtual gym.
Real-time data
While the gym might be virtual, your results are definitely real. With the help of an AR device in the daily fitness routine, people can perfectly track all the activities. These devices take track of everything from what distance you cover when jogging or cycling, to the calories consumed. Thanks to this data, users can make critical decisions about their future workouts, like whether to increase or reduce intensity, helping you not overstress while monitoring the activity and allowing you to see your improvements at the same time.
AR/VR technology is able to give you real-time insight on your activity. It can suggest the workout that works best for you, based on your weight, height, precedent activities and possible results, allowing you to have the best workout outcome.
AR can keep you more motivated and bring fun to your workout session
It is known that motivation is the most critical factor affecting your fitness routine, and staying motivated all the time is almost impossible. AR fitness technology can help with that. AR apps can choose the perfect workout for you, starting from the basics and intensify the exercises with your timing and possibilities. This improves your motivation, since you are more able to see the first results in terms of strength, change of the exercises and your saved history. As we saw earlier, it is all tracked, and seeing your results clearly will definitely help you stay motivated.
AR can also bring a more gaming experience, especially when using specific apps like “Zombie, run” where you find yourself running from zombies or “run social”, a virtual experience where you can choose the perfect place for your jogging session like a beach, a wood, Central Park and many more. This generates amusement in the user together with motivation and the simple workout can become an innovative and inspiring experience.
Improve your eating habits with AR
Improving your lifestyle is hard work that goes beyond just caring about the fitness aspect. It is something that involves several positions. One important aspect to be considered for instance is our personal diet. Having a healthy lifestyle means also conducting a healthy diet, eating healthy food and not too much. In this case too, AR can come to rescue you!
The first and the biggest innovation that AR can bring to your food habits is raising awareness and understandability on what you are eating, giving you information about the type of food, the calories, the quantity suggested to consume and other. Researchers are now studying AR glasses that record in real time what is in your plate, giving you all the info necessary. The best part is that the info given changes while you’re eating, monitoring every step of the feeding process, from the whole plate to its emptiness, so that you know exactly what you are eating and how.
Another app called Habit.at uses AR to change the perception that people have toward specific kinds of food. How it works: it basically changes the environment around the plate, with the aim of dissuading from bad eating habits, so that healthy foods will be surrounded by a more positive and funnier environment, in order to stimulate on keeping eating those foods.
AR can help you improve your mental health
Reducing anxiety with AR
Sometimes, all we need to feel like our lifestyle seems improved is a little break: a break from our everyday life and our daily routines. And sometimes, only 10 deep minutes are enough to re-energize us. Augmented reality can help with that too! There are, indeed, amazing little experiences that one can use to reduce anxiety, feeling less stressed or just to have 10 minutes of calm fun. In those experiences you can immerse yourself in amazing landscapes and places using the right device, that otherwise would have been impossible to go to, such as the most breathtaking beach of the Maldives, the calm woods of Norway, beautiful Italian flowers field etc. and stay there the exact amount of time that you need to rebalance yourself. For an even more relaxing experience, also SPAs are starting to introduce virtual experiences like that in their services, combining existing treatments with virtual surroundings, to have a full, mind blowing, relaxing experience.
Starting your meditation journey has never been easier
Another importa aspect of improving your lifestyle with AR and VR is meditating. Numerous AR apps now can help you guide your first steps toward meditation. With guided voices and virtual tours, it is possible to feel immersed deep in one’s mind, facilitating the process of focusing on oneself and accelerating the learning process of meditation discipline. The most known apps are Psious, Clevr and Guided Meditation.
Medically speaking, besides surgery and general healthcare, AR is now used in mental health in psychology, helping patients to overcome their phobias, traumas and other issues. Anyway, we feel ready to try improving our lifestyle using AR and see how the results will be. Are you joining us, too?