Currently, heart rate monitor is not commonplace, but the Xbox Kinect can change that. Now, I’ve been immersed in the fitness space for the last two years, and one thing we know is the importance of measuring heart rate during physical activity to understand the longterm impact of that activity on an individual’s health. This technology was invented by a group of researchers at MIT, and Xbox Kinect is a great way to showcase the applicability of it. In case you haven’t seen yet, check out this video of the Xbox Kinect detecting a person’s heart rate just by changes in the colors on their skin. However, the apps likely to make the biggest difference in health will need another three to five years of development before they hit the market, but they will be nothing short of Sci-Fi turned reality. The fitness apps will be the first to come, and over the next one to two years we will see a flood of them. Now we can start imagining a RunKeeper or MapMyRun app for Xbox that focuses on training for a run that beautifully integrates with your training plan. Next generation fitness games will be able not only to tell you how to make a downward dog or a squat, but the games will be able to tell you to keep your back straight, or move your left foot six inches to the right. The first category of games to benefit from these high-end sensors is fitness games, which are already leveraging the previous version of Kinect, and also made Nintendo's Wii Fit hyper popular.

Microsoft released the first Kinect just three years ago, but they’ve been working on the software for more than a decade, and they’ve built a platform, which means new apps (not only games) will be able to tap into an amazing source of information on our body. But those are just sensors, the magic happens on the software. In case you are not a gamer or didn’t follow the news, the new Kinect comes packed with lots of high-end gear like a high-resolution digital camera, an infrared camera and several high-fidelity microphones. Here is a bold statement: No other device, with the exception of the smartphone, will do more for the evolution of health technology than the Kinect 2.0 on the new Xbox One. Marcelo Calbucci is the Co-founder & CTO of EveryMove and a former development manager at Microsoft

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