Sparking a Healthier Lifestyle

The new Spark Activity Tracker

While there may be other fitness trackers out there, the locally developed Spark Activity Tracker is the only wireless activity tracker that tracks your daily activities and enables you to create a healthy lifestyle program on SparkPeople.com.

With the free nutrition and fitness based tools that SparkPeople.com offers combined with the Spark Activity Tracker’s daily activity tracking abilities, people are able to understand how much activity they’re getting throughout the day and how that fits into their overall healthy living goals.

SparkPeople.com was founded in 2001 by Chris Downie. “Chris had previously helped others form goals and improve their lives and he wanted to bring this spark of goodwill and intention to the rest of the world. We were originally solely a goal setting site, but we learned almost immediately that our members were interested in fitness, nutrition and health goals in particular, so we refocused as a health and fitness site in 2002. SparkPeople.com is a free advertiser-run site which allows us to help millions of people improve their lives,” says Joe Robb, Digital Marketing Manager for SparkPeople.

Nicole Nichols with SparkPeople

When Robb and fellow SparkPeople staffers recognized that there was yet to be a website that offered a way to track your fitness, nutrition, weight loss and overall healthiness all using one site they came up with the idea to develop an easy-to-use activity tracking device that allowed the user to track everything using only SparkPeople.com.

“The Spark is the only activity tracker that fully integrates with the free tools, content and community on SparkPeople.com,” Robb says. “It tracks running, walking, indoor cycling, elliptical, and general activity you do while going about your day. All you have to do is clip the Spark to a shoe, belt, or a bra and go about your normal day. The Spark comes with a USB you can plug into your computer and your fitness data automatically syncs and uploads into our online health and fitness toolset.”

While one of the biggest differences between the Spark Activity Tracker and other fitness trackers is that SparkPeople.com makes it possible for the Spark to track all aspects of health and fitness using only there site, the Spark also has two other distinct physical differences: battery life and small form factor.

“Most fitness trackers on the market today require the user to plug in the tracker every day, either to recharge the battery or to sync your data. When preparing to launch this device, we talked with our members and found that they didn’t want to have to plug in their tracker every day, that if they missed a day of charging, they missed a day of tracking their fitness, and the tracker became less useful,” Robb says, “The Spark runs on a watch battery that lasts 6-12 months, plus we include an extra battery for free. The device is small and easy to clip on anywhere. Best of all the tracker is waterproof.”

Since the Spark Activity Tracker launch in October there has been an overwhelmingly positive response from people all over the country, according to Robb. “The most common response from our members is that they’re happy that they can do all of their tracking on one site. Before our tracker, if you wanted to track fitness, nutrition, weight loss and overall healthiness you would have to use mish-mash of tracking tools and sites,” explains Robb. The device is currently being sold for $59.95 in two colors, Glossy and Matte Gray, on sparkactivitytracker.com and Amazon.

SparkPeople has been promoting the Spark Activity Tracker all across the country and will be at Digital Pharma East, one of the largest healthy living and fitness websites in the country, next week. Robb shared that SparkPeople will be launching some more interesting projects in the next month or two.

If you would like to learn more about the Spark Activity Tracker or SparkPeople you can visit SparkPeople.com or sparkactivitytracker.com. For healthy lifestyle recipes you may visit SparkPeople’s sister website SparkRecipes.com.