A North Korean company recently launched a mobile fitness application, Arirang-Meari, a North Korean internet news outlet, said on Wednesday.

The app is the work of the Pyongyang Science Technology Information Company, and can reportedly be used on tablets PCs and mobile phones.

“Recently invented, the application ‘Momdallyeonui Gildongmu’ is highly popular among the people,” Arirang-Meari said.

The name roughly translates to “Workout Companion”, and the app has “multiple kinds of information that greatly help enhance one’s health and fitness,” the article says, including information about the different types of muscles in the body and what exercises can enhance them.

Detailed introductions on how to use different sports equipment is also included.

With mobile phone use in North Korea on the rise, the Workout Companion is just one of multiple new domestically produced IT products, which have recently included a mobile farming app, a cloud computing service, and a business to business shopping platform.

Government-led efforts to improve fitness are also on the rise: this year alone, the state turned a long-neglected island in Pyongyang into a high-end sports hub and launched an anti-smoking campaign.

So far little information about the Pyongyang Science Technology Information Company is publicly available: the name has not appeared in previous state media reports and is yet to be registered among the list of North Korean companies on the Pyongyang-based Naenara website.

One source, a regular visitor to Pyongyang with a background in IT, said they had not heard the name, with a Seoul-based North Korean IT expert agreeing that it was not yet a widely known company.

“It is possible the Pyongyang Science Technology Information Company is a new player in the rapidly growing field of North Korean IT,” Choi Sung, a professor at the Computer Science department at Namseoul University, told NK News.

While it is the first time Choi has heard of the name of the company, he said it did not come as a surprise that North Korean companies were developing health-related applications.

“There is an IT company run by a Korean-Chinese businessperson I know in Yanji, China,” he said. “Around 500 young North Korean IT developers work for him as the contractors, majorly developing health-care related applications: similar to the Workout Companion.”

Edited by Oliver Hotham

Featured Image: Uriminzokkiri