Lifestyle

Get your personal health advisor at your fingertips

Tired of visiting clinics and seeking appointments with doctors? Well, here is an app that provides you with best health solutions. On a single touch comes your rescuer to avoid doctors and clinics.Tap on to Fitcircle, a chat based health and fitness app which provides free coaching to individual customers.In today’s fast paced world, apps like FitCircle are a boon for time-strapped people. Started in 2013 with a different brand name, the app was relaunched few weeks ago to encourage people to adopt fitness as a way of life – instead of treating fitness as an added chore in one’s daily regime.“Ideally, you don’t want to visit the doctor daily but you want guidance from heath and wellness coach on a regular basis. Fitcircle provides easy to do, quick home workouts through chat and also shares a continuous wellbeing assessment of the user through a combination of smart chat-bots and human experts,” said FitCircle founder Aarti Gill.FitCircle focuses on preventive steps rather than curative solutions. Aiming to reduce the effort to visit doctors daily, the app has come up with a team of expert coaches, nutritionists and health advisors who provide personalised advices to users for free.“We believe a lot of doctor’s visits can just be reduced if we create a strong ecosystem of experts and motivation engine in health and fitness,” Gill maintained.The app has also introduced chat-bots, for easy and better communication between its users and health advisors.“To cater to its customers more effectively, FitCircle has developed innovative chat bots for automated tracking, monitoring and engagement. The unique combination of experts and bots enables the company to offer global users instant, high-quality advice anytime, even at the upper scale.FitCircle has also optimised the behavioural triggers that keep users engaged and motivated to achieve their fitness goals,” Gill added. According to its founder, youngsters, who are now-a-days extremely health conscious make for the largest user group.The app has been a great attraction with people aged between 18 and 35. “A majority of the users come to achieve the following goals – weight loss, weight gain, muscle toning. We have also seen a rise in users who are looking for Sports Nutrition guidance.The experts guide them on diet, workouts and other healthier options that they can adopt. We also create goal based support groups so that people can help each other in adopting a healthier lifestyle,” Gill pointed out. So, how does the app function? FitCircle creates daily challenges for workouts and nutrition – and enables users to track their activities through their smartphones.“Users can log on and discuss their health problems via a one-on-one chat which is completely confidential. After a thorough analysis of their problems by a team of experts, users get a list curated health choices and a personalised solution to tackle their health problem head-on,” Gill added. Asked what makes FitCirlce stand apart from other fitness apps, Gill replied: “Other fitness apps mainly concentrate on tracking and other automated features and charging consumers for expert guidance.FitCircle provides expert guidance for free. We are changing the way the industry operates.” FitCircle has created an ecosystem of experts, private social support groups, products- all keeping in mind what is best for the user. The app also aims at making group fitness fun by making goal based private support-groups where users can encourage each other to keep at it.Not just health aware users, but many corporate companies are now jumping on the technology bandwagon to encourage employees to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Gill added that the app has been adopted by corporate houses like P&G, Medtronic and Nielsen, FoodPanda who are offering these services to their employees in order to encourage employee health and wellness.As for the business model, it’s a combination of sponsorships and advertisements. -IANS