Digital fitness company Pear Sports buys AI-enabled health coach Performance Lab

This deal comes only a few months after Pear Sports purchased Functional Solutions.
By Laura Lovett
03:58 pm
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Yesterday morning digital health and fitness company Pear Sports announced its purchase of artificial intelligence exercise-coaching platform Performance Lab. 

Performance Lab specializes in using AI to gain insights into athletic performance and then develop a personalized exercise program. Pear Sports plans to use this technology in its real-time interactive coaching tool.

“The mission at Pear Sports is to leverage increasingly pervasive activity data from wearables, interpret it and apply it in ways that can impact the effectiveness of digital coaching and even human touch coaching,” Bob Allison, founder of Pear Sports, said. “Adding Performance Lab’s science and AI algorithms to PEAR’s real-time coaching technology means we will be able to offer the only truly intelligent, custom adaptive-training solution on the market. We are thrilled to welcome the experienced team at Performance Lab to [Pear Sports] and to work together to create a powerful player in the digital health and fitness arena.”

This news comes a little over two months since Pear Sports acquired Functional Solutions, a visual programming and custom fitness content company. 

WHY IT MATTERS 

While the coronavirus pandemic rages on, folks are looking for ways to stay healthy. Recently digital tools have cropped up as a way for consumers to monitor their activity level and gain insights into their fitness. Several companies have jumped on the bandwagon. Wearable giant Fitbit said that it will be offering its 90-day free trial of Fitbit Coach and Fitbit Premium during the pandemic. Online fitness centers, such as GymCube, are also reporting an increase in users. 

The new AI capabilities Pear Sports seeks to gain with this acquisition would help the company stand out from this growing crowd of digital-fitness options.

THE LARGER TREND 

Digital-fitness tools are plentiful. Several players are adding AI algorithms to their fitness platforms. For example, last year Aaptive added a new AI coach that uses a proprietary algorithm to personalize fitness routines and offer lifestyle suggestions to each user. 

Another AI-powered fitness platform is Life Beam, which includes a set of connected headphones and an AI fitness coach.

 

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