Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your company.

Arel English: Fitness has always been a really important part of my life and is something I struggled with as a kid. In college, first as an athlete and later as a coach, I learned the importance of strength training for health and fitness and achieving meaningful results. The problem is that strength training is really complicated and intimidating, so we created Vitogo to make strength training easy and fun.

BD: What is the “elevator pitch” for why someone should use your app?

AE: Strength training is a really important part of a healthy lifestyle. Not only does it help you look better, it’s also an important part of weight loss, reducing your risk of injury, and increasing bone density. The problem is knowing how to strength train effectively. Vitogo makes it simple. Just like a personal trainer, Vitogo assesses your fitness level and goals to give you a tailored workout program that evolves with you. It coaches you through every step of your workout, tracks your progress, and keeps you motivated with the support of your friends, other users, and rewards.

BD: How did you get started using the Health Graph API?

AE: As an avid RunKeeper user before the idea for Vitogo even existed, I used to complain that my strength training workouts didn’t count toward anything on my RunKeeper account, so when we decided to build Vitogo, the first thing we wanted to do was look into how we could have our workouts post to RunKeeper so we could get credit for all our hard work. At the time, the Health Graph API hadn’t been announced, so we were pretty excited to learn about it when we first reached out to RunKeeper about the possibility of integrating Vitogo.

BD: How is using the Health Graph benefiting your business?

AE: The Health Graph is a great way to aggregate everything active we’re doing online. Just like how Facebook made it easy for new services to seamlessly share information socially across the web, the Health Graph has made it really easy to seamlessly share healthy activity. Sharing healthy activity and being able to aggregate it and see the big picture makes Vitogo that much better a product, and is something we are really excited about!

BD: Which portions of the Health Graph API do you use, and why?

AE: Right now we’re just publishing to the Fitness Feed and pulling Vitogo users’ RunKeeper activities. We want to quickly expand to sending calories burned and strength training statistics to the Health Graph so our users can get a more integrated experience.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph? What would you like to see changed?

AE: Being able to fully integrate Vitogo, a heart rate monitor, a swimming tracker, and tons of other stuff that I use to track my activities is hugely powerful, that’s what I love about the Health Graph. I’m looking forward to being able to see exactly what each service is going to publish to RunKeeper, and pull from RunKeeper, so I know for example if Vitogo is going to update my total number of calories burned, and number of activities done that month.

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

AE: Having the ability to control how individual apps post to the fitness feed would be an awesome extension of the Health Graph. We would like Vitogo to be able to post simple stories about a user’s strength training workout with the same type of control you have when deciding how your app posts to Facebook or Twitter.

BD: Can you share any future plans for your app? What’s coming next that your users will be excited about? Does the Health Graph play a role in that, and if so, how?

AE: We are really excited about getting users using Vitogo and giving us feedback on what they love, and what we can do better. We want to make sure that everyone using Vitogo feels confident and in control at the gym. We’re also going to continue to improve our Health Graph integration so our users get the best total picture of their fitness.

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you or your application?

AE: Vitogo is an iPhone/ iPod Touch app and a website! Using Vitogo.com is as much a part of the experience as using the app!

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

Watch this the next time you need reminding that anything is possible!

Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your interest in the Health Graph API.

David Cohen: I am a senior software developer for Isobar North America, focusing mostly on back-end development in the worlds of Java and PHP. I also box on a (very) amateur level and am in the very early contemplative stages of what kind of Health Graph application I could develop to work with that.

After participating in Isobar’s Create 48 NFC Hackathon as part of Team Beer Pants Meeting, I became aware of and interested in working with the Health Graph API through a series of similar hackathon events hosted by Terrible Labs.

BD: Why did you develop your own Java wrapper for accessing the Health Graph API?

DC: In the setting of a series of shorter hackathons – being a few hours at a time rather than a marathon over the course of several days – developing a wrapper in a language that I was already familiar with seemed like a great way to both become familiar with the new API and to provide a tool that would be of use to Java developers who wanted to created Health Graph applications in the future.

BD: Which portions of the Health Graph API does your wrapper support? Do you use all of them in your own application?

DC: The wrapper is currently a work in progress, but the goal is to have it support the entire Health Graph API. I do not currently have my own application built off of the wrapper but I do hope to be able to use it for application development in the near future.

BD: Are there any portions of the Health Graph API that you don’t currently support but plan to in the future?

DC: There are plenty of portions that are still works in progress, but nothing that isn’t currently being worked on in terms of support.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph? What would you like to see changed?

DC: I love the depth of data potentially represented by the Health Graph. It’s hard to look at API specifications and not have at least a few ideas for a mash-up application come to mind.

The only problem I see is right now is one that most new projects, especially ones with a large scope, suffer from: The documentation could use some improvements. It should call out specific changes when API updates are made.

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

DC: Having not really worked on the application development layer yet, my new feature request might not be ground-breakingly exciting but I would love to see an API call added that contained a map of the MIME types with keys that would not change, so that I could dynamically create my MIME type maps for wrapper calls and not have to worry about getting bad requests when the API updates.

BD: Can you share any future plans for your wrapper? What’s coming next that Health Graph developers may be excited about?

DC: Once the wrapper is stable and contains all of the current API features, I plan on writing a sample application that will give developers a good place to start implementing the features contained within the Health Graph and wrapper. After that I may even start working on an application of my own!

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you or your wrapper?

DC: Just that so far it has been a great experience working with the Health Graph and the RunKeeper team. You all have been nothing short of extraordinarily helpful and ready to answer all of my requests and point out when my “bug reports” are real or just me implementing something poorly. So thanks!

(Editor’s note: You can see David and Team Beer Pants Meeting in action at Isobar’s hackathon around 3:16 into the video below.)

Isobar Create 48 NFC Hackathon from Isobar US on Vimeo.

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.

Bill Day: Please tell us about yourself and your company.

Rick Wenner: My background is as a fitness educator and I have spent the last decade instructing thousands of fitness professionals and consumers on how to properly maintain a healthy lifestyle. I have always seen technology as a crucial tool in expanding the possibilities and opportunities within the fitness industry. I have dedicated much of my professional career to developing award winning fitness products. I am now the Category Manager for Health and Fitness at Scosche Industries where I focus on promoting and developing Scosche’s line of Health and Fitness products.

BD: What is the “elevator pitch” for why someone should use myTREK?

RW: The Scosche myTREK is a wireless pulse monitor that is worn on your forearm as opposed to a traditional chest strap. Paired with the Scosche myTREK app, you can manage your pulse, training type, calories burned, distance/speed/pace and more. Scosche myTREK also allows you to control your music while you work out with the integrated buttons on the armband; volume up/down, play/pause and previous/next track.

BD: How did you get started using the Health Graph API?

RW: We realized that RunKeeper had a great platform for individuals tracking and sharing their health metrics with like-minded consumers. Once we launched we saw that quite a few of our users wanted to have the ability to share their myTREK workouts on RunKeeper’s Health Graph.

BD: How is using the Health Graph benefiting your business?

RW: Consumers began noticing our team’s posts during our beta testing and started asking how they could link their myTREK to the Health Graph. Since then, we have had great feedback from our existing customers, who were hoping that they would see this partnership. We are also seeing an increase in app downloads and myTREK purchases.

BD: Which portion of the Health Graph API do you use, and why?

RW: We are currently using the Fitness Activities portion of the Health Graph API. We use this to allow users’ myTREK activities to be continually monitored.

BD: What do you like about the Health Graph?

RW: The Health Graph is a great tool for enabling individuals to track their progress in one or more aspects of their fitness journey. This type of constant feedback shows the individual their end result; this can either be rewarding or show them that they need to modify their workouts to see the desired results.

BD: If you could request any new feature from the Health Graph, what would it be? How would you use it?

RW: The Scosche myTREK app allows users to name their workouts. It would be great if the Health Graph could recognize what the user named the workout and track it accordingly. Currently the only way to define the workout is via the notes section.

BD: Can you share any future plans for myTREK and related Scosche products? What’s coming next that your users will be excited about?

RW: Scosche has big plans for the Health and Fitness Category; however, we are not at liberty to divulge them at this time. What I can say is that we will be launching an Android app in the very near future.

BD: Is there anything else we should know about you, Scosche, or myTREK?

RW: We are focused on creating a complete exercise experience; an experience which motivates, guides and entertains by seamlessly incorporating music, social media, and all that connects you to the world. Scosche’s award winning myTREK app and hardware are a glimpse of the great things that are still to come from the Scosche Health and Fitness Category.

Cross-posted from the Health Graph blog.