They say adults are supposed to complete 30 minutes of physical activity every day. With the amount of health and fitness applications littered throughout the various app stores, it's easy to see that smartphones have become today's tool of choice for monitoring our physical fitness. Safe Runner is one of many fitness trackers found on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, but what makes it different is that it also aims to implement new safety alarms that could be used in other health and fitness applications.
While Safe Runner is both a fitness performance tracker and a safety alarm, it’'s the latter that really sells this app to any fitness guru. The application is very simple. Once downloaded, you're asked to input information like your name and email address as well as the phone number and email address of your dedicated emergency contact.
Once the setup is complete, Safe Runner will start tracking your location and distance traveled. If you do encounter danger along your path, Safe Runner can automatically send an email, text and even video footage to your emergency contact. To trigger the safety alert, simply pull your headphones from the headphone jack on your device. Once pulled, the alarm sends out the alerts and your front-facing camera starts recording footage. If the headphones get accidentally yanked out of your device, you can cancel the alert by reinserting them within 10 seconds.
The safety alert from Safe Runner is a great feature and is undoubtedly the best reason to try the app. While the app is a fitness tracker at its core, I wasn't terribly impressed by the actual tracking that it offers. The app uses your device's GPS locator to calculate distance traveled while also giving an estimate of the number of calories burned. However, there aren't any differentiators like weight, height or even sex to give the application more information about your performance. With these features missing, Safe Runner is just a simple distance tracker when it comes to monitoring your fitness progress. I would love to see more features added to this app in the future.
The Wrap-up
The Good: Safe Runner's alert system works really well. I was glad to see successful alerts reach my partner on a couple test runs. This feature is going to promote an aspect of safety that could be used in other fitness apps.
The Bad: The performance tracking is very limited.
The Verdict: Even though the fitness tracking on Safe Runner is mediocre, the real point of using the application is its safety alert. I was impressed by the simple setup process and ingenious headphone jack alarm trigger. For those looking for an in-depth health and fitness application, your money might be better spent elsewhere. Anyone that's just looking for an extra sense of security during your early morning run should check out Safe Runner on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store at a price of $1.99.
