Exercise machines and Google Maps


There are a number of exercise machines – mainly treadmills and some exercise bicycles, that interface with Google Maps to make exercise more interesting.

A cheap DIY solution is to use a reed relay closed by a magnet to operable the up arrow on a keyboard. A lot cheaper, but is does not have the feedback to change the treadmill angle or exercise cycle resistance with the gradient.

Some of these devices are behemoths and far to large for the average lounge room. Some have built in computers which would be dinosaurs well before the service life of the exercise machine.

It would seem obvious to standardise on a short range radio link such as WiFi or Bluetooth to interact with a tablet, laptop  or phone (Apple and Android seem to the the main flavours). The machine would be cheap and  just have the basic controls and the user would use their device to add the extras, data logging and analysis. An obvious data channel would be heart rate from a heart rate belt (I have reverse engineered one with a 10 mH coil), but it should be possible to add other channels and cheap sensors like oxygen sensors (?oximeters) become available.

I wonder how long it will be before this becomes a reality.

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