It’s been fun thinking about what a post-iPhone world might look like—especially in light of Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s recent $6.5B bet on ambient, AI-first devices (via the acquisition of io).
Would love feedback or ideas for where to take it next.
Hey thanks for your feedback, it’s really appreciated!
Since there’s interest, I’ll publish the source code to help others learn, and put the app on the App Store for those who just want to use it.
Regarding burpees and other types of motion, I’m looking into their motion characteristics, so that I can include them for detection.
Burpees would likely require recognizing different phases (the jump, the stand, the push, etc) and then when it detects them in sequence, incrementing the count. Something like that, but stay tuned! :)
Makes sense! For burpees, I think the jump part is perhaps 'just noise', in the sense that if you are accurately counting the push-up at the bottom (i.e. can ignore 'the noise' in-between push-ups) then it would work fine. Just a thought.
That’s true, and since it’s only tracking head movement at the moment, some further refinements would be needed to account for good positioning. I’d like to develop it further to see what else this technique can recognize.
Yeah wearables limitation is they rarely track both open and closed chain exercises. closed chain = dips/pullup where you move body through space, usually hands locked so watches/bands don't work, open chain = body fixed, move limbs like BP where this method won't work well. If it's something being worn, it needs to be adjusted to differnt positions to track different exercises, which makes implementation finicky.
It’s called a gym buddy ;) Only half-joking. I found having someone spot you, count or just stay accountable is a game changer. Whether thats a friend, or a personal trainer, it's always more fun in company!
Oh awesome!! I was curious whether it was feasible to distill that kind of information from the Watch. Looking at this, apparently it is! Thanks for sharing.
I hear you! Finding an app that does just what you want can feel pretty overwhelming sometimes. I like how you phrase “counts reps of any repeating motion”, that’s sparked some ideas! Thanks!
Would love feedback or ideas for where to take it next.
I wrote up my developer journey in a longer blog post including some background on how the project started as a vibe-code experiment: https://richarddas.com/blog/chatgpt-client-for-apple-watch/