The public's concern over health and fitness has increased dramatically in recent years. Health clubs have been formed in order to provide a pleasant environment in which to exercise and to provide various incentives to help members stay fit. With booming memberships, health clubs have had problems in monitoring and controlling the use of their facilities to ensure that they are used only by authorized users. Typically, club members are provided with a membership card. To gain access to the club facilities, the card is usually shown to an attendant at a check-in desk who merely looks to see that it is a proper card for the club. Heretofore, from a visual inspection of the card, the attendant has had no way of knowing whether the user is current in paying his or her membership dues or whether the user is in fact the real owner of the card.
Large club memberships cause further problems to health clubs which have computerized equipment such as scales or exercise machines. Often such computerized equipment requires user records to be stored to provide a history of various physical attributes of the user. The history data may then be used to provide an indication of the user's progress. For example, computerized scales are known which display the weight history of a user as well as his current weight. Such equipment, however, typically does not have the capability necessary to store user history information for clubs with large memberships. Further, when a health club has plural computerized machines or scales, each machine or scale must store the same user history information. The cost for providing and maintaining such equipment with duplicate memories, however, is prohibitive.