Maintaining a good standard of physical fitness is essential if you want to live a long and productive life. One of the tools that people use to help them get fit in the modern era is the fitness tracker.
This is among the top gadgets for monitoring health metrics, ranging from the number of calories consumed to miles walked or run and heart rate. It has become a central part of the exercise regimen for many people and there are lots of good fitness trackers on the market now.
However it turns out that these devices can be useful during other activities too. One example of that is gaming.
So how can fitness trackers improve gaming? Read on to find out.
Gaming and Health
This is not as unlikely a discovery as it may sound. Links between playing games and good health have been well established by research over the past few years.
Those health benefits range from physical ones like faster reflexes to mental health ones such as improved cognitive abilities. Now however, some of the companies that make fitness trackers are looking at using the data they collect to improve both the games and the experiences of those who play them.
How Fitness Trackers Could Improve Gaming
One of the biggest companies that produce these devices is Huami. It is responsible for the Xiaomi and the Amazfit among other trackers and it is leading the way in linking them to gaming.
The idea is that a fitness tracker that you are wearing and that monitors your heart rate will be able to alter what is happening in the game based on it. For instance if your heart rate slows, this could indicate that you are becoming bored with the game, and then the tracker will be used to shift it into a more exciting gaming mode.
Alternately, it could ease things off if your heart rate is too high. Thus if you are playing the online casino games at Virgin Games, the tracker could direct you towards more exciting and risky bets to help keep you having maximum fun.
Or it could direct you to take a break from the poker, blackjack or roulette game that you are playing if it picks up an overly high heart rate. Casino gaming is exciting but players need to keep their emotions under control to do it well, so the addition of fitness trackers to online and mobile casino could stop people from making bad or reckless bets when in the grip of emotions.
The patent that Huami has filed would see an inbuilt fitness tracker make the necessary adjustments to the game in real-time based on heart rate data. Whether it is ensuring that casino and other games remain sufficiently exciting or stopping them from going too far the other way, this could radically improve the experience for players.
An individual’s heart rate while playing a game is the sort of information that does not lie, which makes it invaluable to the manufacturers of games. Huami is predicting that its idea could enable either the mobile games app or console to measure infinitesimal changes in the emotional responses of players during the game.
That includes increases and decreases in excitement, but also nervousness and other emotions. These can then be used to shift the action on screen to ensure that the experience of the gamer remains optimal at all times.
Fitness Tracker Gamification
This is all very interesting and it could be another step forward for the manufacturers of games like online roulette and blackjack. However it is not the only way in which fitness trackers and gaming are connected to one another.
There is also something that is known as ‘gamification’. This is the idea that things related to playing games can be applied to other tasks, including exercise, and it has been central to fitness trackers from the very beginning.
These devices provide information metrics for exercise completed that encourage those wearing them to set ever-higher goals for themselves. That is also central to gaming, where players must try to complete further challenges to progress in the game.
Thus using a fitness tracker when you are trying to get into shape will train you to set targets, reach them and set new ones. Then when you are playing games you will be able to draw on that increased discipline to achieve goals within the game.
So fitness tracker gamification does not just help with your exercise journey it will also make you better and more successful at playing games.
Fitness trackers have the potential to improve your gaming experiences by providing data that can be used to alter the game, but also by teaching you important discipline.