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MS in Kinesiology

Our Clinical Exercise Physiology concentration prepares you to become an American College of Sports Medicine Certified Clinical Exercise Physiologist

Fitzen starts

FitZen's Grimm, Ling and Zhou as they await the judges' decision.

As doctoral students in kinesiology and nutrition, Heather Grimm and Chenyi Ling are very interested in seeing people adopt healthy lifestyles. They noticed the rising use of health-management apps and wearable activity trackers, but they also felt “current apps are underdeveloped. We wanted to create an app with the fullest potential to help people live healthier [lives],” says Grimm.

So they did just that: created an app, and a start-up company to go with it, called FitZen. The product is actually “an app-based consulting service that intercepts physiological data collected during ... daily physical activity to design a training [improvement] plan,” according to the company (which also includes UIC business student Huizhang Zhou).

FitZen then entered---and made it to the final round---of UIC's 10th annual Concept2Venture business-plan competition. The team won $500 for advancing so far in the “Shark Tank”-style contest, and impressed one judge so much that he plans to invest $1,000 of his own money in the young company. They hope to launch the app publically later this year.

Grimm says they learned from the competition that, “There is a very big gap between the way a scientist thinks and a business person thinks,” but adds that both she and Ling still, “are hoping to become entrepreneurs focused on health-related technology businesses to improve people’s quality of life.”

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