According to a report from Engadget (and some new pages on Adidas' website), Adidas is gearing up to open its miCoach platform to developers.

Though few details are available right now (the API has not been officially announced), it appears likely the developer tools will allow other apps to integrate movement, tracking, and even coaching data from Adidas miCoach products, which include the miCoach Smart Run watch, the XCell heartrate and activity tracker, the sports-tracking Speed Cell, and tools for tracking and supporting whole sports teams.

"Consumer owned resources provide information on how a miCoach consumer manages their own training plan, synchronise their workout data, manage their profile, view workout history, challenges, achievements, events and much more," Adidas says on its developer site. It also mentions a second API for "content". 

The company is also soon to launch Fit Smart, its own wristworn activity tracker. The device tracks heart rate, calories, pace, distance, and stride rate and is designed to help athletes when they are running or training. Fit Smart records data while users work out and then the companion app suggests training plans and strategies so that users can reach their goals. Users can set weekly goals as well as longer term goals based on training plans developed by coaching service EXOS (formerly Athletes’ Performance). Through EXOS, Adidas offers hundreds of training plans that are free to access for Fit Smart owners.

Both the launch of Fit Smart and the bid for an open Adidas ecosystem echo moves made by Nike in years past with its Nike+ Fuel. Notably, Adidas' moves come at a time when Nike appears to have backed off of its device, Fuelband, letting most of its hardware team go back in April. Exactly what Nike's plan for Fuel is will likely become clear if longtime partner Apple launches its long-awaited wearable next month.

At the HXRefactored healthcare design conference in Brooklyn this year, Adidas VP of Innovation Qaizar Hassonjee was on site searching for partners and presumably laying the groundwork for this open API. Interestingly, he suggested that the company is looking for use cases outside of sports — in wellness and possibly even healthcare.

“All of this up until now has been a very closed system,” he said at the time. “What we have had is our devices working with our apps and our platform and our coaching. We now have had so much experience with the content we have that we are looking at opening this platform up. We want to look to partner with people who have better experiences then we have with our devices and people who have devices and can bring more information, so that we can use the content, and then have a platform so we can share information in terms of what’s happening to users who happen to also be patients and happen to also want to be fit and healthy. We want to see how we can work together with other people outside of sports who have the same needs — to be fit, to be healthy.”