Fitness app developer and device maker Runtastic today announced two new products: a smart bathroom scale, called Libra, which tracks a number of different health and fitness metrics, and a set of four custom-written audio stories set to music designed to motivate runners through their workouts.
The Runtastic Libra is a smart scale that measures eight different aspects of one's health: weight, body fat, "goals" (that the user sets), muscle mass, body mass index, body water content, calorie calculation, and bone mass. The calorie calculation is an estimation of how many calories your body burns in a day, based on all the other details the scale knows about you, and based on the information collected by Runtastic's mobile apps, used for tracking running, bicycling, and other activities.
Data from the scale automatically syncs to your smartphone and Runtastic.com account in real time via Bluetooth 4 Runtastic.com. Runtastic Libra will be available to buy in the U.S. for $129 through Amazon.com by Black Friday, according to CEO Florian Gschwandtner.
The second piece of news from Runtastic, Story Running, is something like a storytelling podcast designed to motivate you to run: 37 minutes of appropriately increasing intensity, both in your effort and in the story arc, with a cooldown toward the end.
Gschwandtner told PCMag that the four stories available at launch were all custom written to follow a particular pattern (see the graph below). Each story also contains background music wherein the beats per minute of the tracks correlate to the intensity of the story and desired increasing or decreasing pace of the runner.
The four stories cover four different themes: motivation, adventure, fantasy, and travel. Each story is told through the point of view of a protagonist who is running, and the reason is revealed in the plot. For example, in the adventure story "The Carrier of Truth—Beyond the Walls of Alcatraz," the protagonist is running to escape the famous island while being chased by hounds and prison guards. The story is his train of thought about what's happening in the moment, as well as his reflection about how he got there.
The stories are in-app purchases for the Runtastic PRO iPhone app or Runtastic PRO Android app and cost $1.99 for one story or $4.99 for all four.
Runtastic announced the two pieces of news at the Pioneers Festival, an international conference about entrepreneurship and disruption in the technology sector, taking place this week in Vienna.