At Time Atlas Labs, we believe that a physically and mentally active life – according to your ability – is good for you. A healthy and active body helps to develop a healthy and vibrant mind. This is something AI won’t do for you, and indeed there is a risk that AI doing more of our thinking for us, we forgot to nurture our own brains. It is the same with physical activity: if a car is taking you to your destination, instead of you walking or biking there, you will need to get that activity elsewhere to ensure your body gets enough exercise. And how about working from home, which has become the norm for many? – you might get surprisingly little casual exercise on those days.
We are currently developing an app, Time Atlas, that goes beyond just counting steps to give you a full view of your active life, with a very exciting development roadmap ahead. We hope you join us to take this vision forward.
What does it mean to have an Active Life?
A typical way to measure one’s activity is to count the number of steps. Smartphones nowadays have a huge number of different step counter apps, which help you track daily step goals, compete with friends and so on.
At Time Atlas Labs, we take a more holistic approach. For us, active life means not only all kinds of physical activity, but also going on trips near or far from home, going to visit a museum, going on a hike with your child, visiting your summer cottage, … Anything that takes you from your basic routines to do something to move your body or mind.
Why Automatic Activity Tracking?
Unlike smart watches or fitness apps, Time Atlas not only counts your steps, but it also automatically detects the type of activity you are doing (walking, running, bicycling and vehicular movement are currently supported). It also keeps track of the places you visited, which provides valuable contextual information. In addition, the app can import workouts and other information from your wearables such as Apple Watch or Oura Ring.
Because the app is automatic, you do not remember to start and stop tracking when you go on a move. This is very useful for several reasons:
- Objective – even when embarrasing: Time Atlas’ tracking does not require you to start and stop, or tho choose an activity. It does it automatically. This is great, but sometimes also embarrasing when you told everyone you went for a long run, but you actually walked big bunch of it (see the picture above). Fortunately, the data is only for your eyes, so you do not tell anyone…
- Tracks all activity: Usually you would not bother tracking shorter, supposedly less significant movements (such as visiting a grocery store) or commuting to and from work, but these can actually be a major source of your activity. Changes in lifestyle (such as working from home) or moving to an area with poor walkability can have significant effects on your daily activity level, and it is important to get an objective view of that. Automatic tracking makes sure you have the complete information.
- You can live the moment: When going on trips, hikes, or excursions, you do not want to keep your phone open and keep track of the places you visit or routes you take. You want to live it, experience it, not document it (apart from taking photos, which Time Atlas also sorts out for you). Actually, often you are too tired or busy to keep logs on what you had been doing. Time Atlas does this record keeping automatically for you, and you can later on come back to view this information and edit (such as selecting which restaurant you visited) easily, thus forming automatic memories that you can revisit and share to your friends and family.
- Lantern in the brain fog: For people like me, who have young children (actually, we got baby twins year ago), you are often in a kind of blurry tired state, or experience “brain fog”. It is great to have Time Atlas keep track of what I have been doing, so I can get back to it later, to remember what did I do or reminisce these special times.
Your Data is Private
Time Atlas is a fully private automatic activity tracker. This means that the data it collects is only available on your phone. We store an end-to-end encrypted backup of the data on our servers, but even the Time Atlas team is not able to access this data because the keys to the data are stored in your Apple Keychain. This means that you can feel confident to record even the most personal moments with the app.
We are looking for Feedback!
The Time Atlas app is currently available for test users globally. You can download the app here. You can provide feedback through the app or join our Discord server. We would be very happy to get your feedback about how Time Atlas could help you live an active life! The app is currently in early stages, and now is the best time to influence the development.
