Imagup General Magazine 2024
The tech marketplace is crowded with literally thousands of applications for phones and computers. These high-tech little bits of code can do wondrous things, from telling you exactly what to eat at a given time to helping you adjust your sleep habits in order to live longer. Apps for health, fitness and insurance are officially a multi-billion-dollar industry.
People seem to want non-human assistants, which is essentially what apps are, to help them work out more efficiently, lose weight, avoid skin cancer, become more muscular, find the best life insurance policy, meditate more deeply, sleep better and compete at a higher level. Here’s a short summary of some of the main kinds of applications that people are downloading in 2024. Many of the products are free, and even the ones that carry a price tag tend to be very inexpensive.
Weight and Diet Control
By far, the best-selling products among all applications are related to dieting and weight control. That’s no surprise considering that the best-selling books in any given year are on the same topic. People seem rather obsessed with losing weight and tracking what kinds of food they eat, and hundreds of apps are happy to help.
Among the most downloaded free and low-cost products in the segment are calorie counters, eating alarms that tell you exactly when you can eat a specific food, daily weight trackers that offer encouragement for weight loss or attainment of goals, and on the spot food analysis tools that let you know if what you are eating fits in with your stated dietary goals for the week, month or year. Most of these products act as cyber nannies that have the power of information on their side.
You’ll never guess about calorie counts, whether you should eat that snack or what your goal weight is for the day. Some medical research has shown that these applications, when used correctly, can help the average person lose weight and maintain proper weight. Food is a huge part of everyone’s life, which is probably why these clever little products seem to be everywhere.
Vital Signs
Whether or not your doctor has advised you to track your vital signs, it can bring a feeling of empowerment when you know your numbers. Some of the better health apps let you keep a close eye on things like blood pressure, oxygen saturation of the blood, cholesterol, respiration rate, skin temperature, heart rate, and even brain waves.
Why all the fuss? Because a change in vital signs is usually the first indication that the body is not working properly. Some users claim that merely tracking blood pressure and heart rate, they can predict when they are going to come down with the flu or a cold and then take preventive measures.
Most of the vital sign trackers are inexpensive but most require at least one monitor that you’ll need to hook up to either a wrist band or adhesive patch. Blood pressure and brain waves are a bit harder to track and require specialized, and pricier, equipment.
Insurance
Insurance-related apps are ingenious in their design and are a solid addition to any consumer’s arsenal of knowledge-based products. It’s not just about comparing premium levels from hundreds of sellers, either. These tiny pieces of computer code can assist you when you want to view comparisons of carriers, features of popular contracts and specific terms of dozens of life insurance policies.
For example, consumers who are shopping for long-term care insurance can go to MasonFinance.com for informative content on the ins and outs of these types of policies. Find out which companies sell such policies, how much they cost, and what the general requirements are for purchasing one.
The standard long-term care coverage contract provides payment directly to institutions and reimburses for any expenses not covered by Medicaid, Medicare or regular health policies. Premiums can be quite high but are usually a good buy considering the unlimited expenses associated with healthcare costs in general.
Exercise
In the 90’s and after, millions of adults hired personal trainers. The idea was to have a helper who not only knew the principles of fitness but would offer encouragement along the road to a stronger, more durable body. Nowadays, the computer application has sort of taken the place of personal trainers, at least for many consumers who prefer to work out alone and use whatever form of non-human help they can get.
Exercise apps are cheap, or free, and offer an effective way to track your workouts, measure how much effort you’ve expended in a given session and keep you on track with positive words and informative guidelines.
Currently, the most downloaded products in this category are running/walking related and weight training related. Many of the apps offer online connectivity so you can see how you compare with others, all over the world, who are doing the same workout you are engaged in. In addition, chat features turn many of these simple products into social media platforms because you can not only compare workouts and results with others but chat and socialize with them as well.
Sun Exposure
One of the better products to arrive on the scene is a cancer prevention product that helps users measure the amount of sun exposure they receive each day. These clever little applications are able to scour the net for up-to-the-minute climatic data and deliver specific totals for sunlight based on your exact geographic location.
They also take the season and date into account, longitude and latitude, cloud cover and your stated skin condition. With skin cancer making its way into the top five most common serious diseases of the decade, this is one product that has the potential to help anyone stay healthy.
Sleep Tracking
Recent research on sleep disorders has revealed that people who don’t get enough sleep are at risk for all sorts of unpleasant ailments like frequent bouts of flu, migraine headaches, strokes and heart attacks. It’s no wonder that some of the most popular non-fitness applications today are sleep trackers.
The algorithms are simple and the data you get is quite enlightening. If you want to know how deeply you sleep, exactly how many hours you’re logging and what your sleep chart looks like, then a sleep tracker is for you.
