Top Health Travel Apps

by Lexa Pennington /
Lexa Pennington's picture
Oct 20, 2012 / 0 comments

Keeping healthy on the road is critical to travel success. We all know to wash our hands, drink bottled water, and make sure to eat right. But how else can we harness technology (i.e., travel apps) to help us stay healthy while we’re traveling?

Here are my top health travel apps:

Hiking:

National Parks Maps – this app has maps for 15 national parks in the US (including Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon). You can find news, reservation information, directions, hike lengths, and more. NOTE: Download this information ahead of time, if you’re going to be in the boonies.

Try North Face’s Trailhead app – it gathers your location (by using Everytrail.com, which is a great walking app) and shows you all the hiking and biking trails in your area. It can also track your speed, route, distance, and elevation. A bonus is that it can find local outdoor events – and even the closest North Face Store.

Exercising:

Runkeeper – a great fitness app that keeps track of your time and pace. Allows for information storage. Monitors just about any fitness activity, including walking, hiking, biking, skiing, snowboarding, skating, swimming, elliptical, rowing – and even wheelchair activities.

Map My Ride – a tracking app for cyclists (also look at MapMyHike and MapMyRun for hiking and running/walking trails and maps).

Gymfinder – looking for a place to exercise, and prefer to do so in a gym? This app finds the closest gym to where you are.

HathaYoga – bring your yoga workouts anywhere! This has yoga classes that you use on your device.

Pilates Interactive – pilates is easy on the road with this app, which provides detailed explanations, routines, and repertoires. There are 50 individual poses and many workout videos. Free and paid versions available.

Playground finder – just what it says – finds you great playgrounds. This is especially helpful if you have kids, but even if you don’t, you can see which playgrounds have workout equipment, or bathrooms and water available.

In airports or cramped hotel rooms, use BreakPal, which has small workouts you can do at a desk or enclosed space, with no equipment.

Eating:

Flysmart, Gate Guru – these apps help you find healthy meal choices in airports.

VegOut – Are you a vegetarian? Fear not – this app, which works with HappyCow.net, helps people find vegetarian, vegan, and other healthy food choices – in 90+ countries!

Veggie Passport – Another vegetarian-friendly app, this is a language translator for the vegetarian traveler.

GlutenFree Cards – shows gluten free needs in different languages.

Health & Safety:

Smart Traveler – from the US State Department, this offers official country information, travel alerts and warnings, and Embassy locations.

Travel Health – gives a drug reference table, as well as a symptom searcher, as well as defined problems (fever, gut, chest, skin, altitude, etc.). Developed by a Doctor, it has medical information and diagnoses. Not to take the place of a regular doctor, but to help you on the road.

Travel Med – important information on water safety and disease information.

GotoAid First Aid – of course first aid information, but also disaster preparedness information.

Pocket First Aid & CPR – from the American Heart Association, this app lists basic first aid instructions and emergency information.

TravelSOS – connects you to emergency services, if you have an emergency while traveling.

Destination Doc – finds you a doctor in different cities around the world.

Travel Emergency – features a searchable database of local emergency numbers and facilities, to English-speaking hospitals. Also has a phrase helper, providing translations of common emergency phrases. This app covers 50 destinations around the world.