Back in 2010, when Fitbit was still in its infancy, before Apple Watch kept after you to close those rings, and Strava hadn’t yet turned movement into a competitive leaderboard, there were two robotics researchers, John Shin and Jeff Lee. They were the kind of folks who think in terms of motors, gears, and sensors, and who spend all day focused on what they refer to as “raw motion signals,” or, for the rest of us, the sensor data a smartphone picks up when its owner moves from point A to point B.
“We studied robotics, so we understood how machines move, and how humans move too,” John explains.
At the time, early versions of smartphones didn’t offer the step tracking that we all take for granted these days. So, if you wanted a pedometer app, you’d have to build it yourself, by taking signals from the accelerometer in your phone, then somehow interpreting them as motion, and then converting them into steps. Not to mention, make it accurate for all ranges of gaits and speeds, and account for all the various places people can keep their phones during this whole process.
No easy feat… unless, of course, you happened to be an expert in motion and sensors.
So that’s exactly what Jeff and John, the co-founders of the robotics and wearable computing company Corusen, set out to do. “We had to process the raw signal ourselves and turn it into a walking pattern,” John says.
That laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the iOS and Android app that’s Accupedo today, a name that stitches together the first parts of the words “accurate” and “pedometer.”
The goal for Accupedo: help people stay active, and keep them moving by seeing their progress in real time.
And it worked. The app quickly caught on across Asia and Europe, drawn in by its simple and easy-to-read UI, reaching millions at first, and eventually hitting 10 million downloads today, each one with a different story behind it.
Take this one user, who shared with John and Jeff, “how he was in rehab, and used the app to track his recovery,” John mentions. “He told us that seeing his progress every day motivated him to keep going.”
For someone in recovery, that kind of feedback can make all the difference. Healing from a critical injury is often uneven and painfully slow, with starts and stops. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether anything is even changing at all.
But when you get to see your step count tick up, day by day, it has a way of making progress more tangible, and more real.
And for John and Jeff, hearing that kind of story about how their app had helped someone like that was an encouraging reminder that Accupedo, as simple as it may sound, can change someone’s life.
