Click here to check if anything new just came in.
January 23 2012
Health and Fitness Gadget Announcements from CES 2012
The gadgets and services for Lifelogging and practitioners of the Quantified Self continues to grow and evolve at a very fast pace. I made a trip to CES this year which was unique in that it provided a situation for my personal and work lives to collide. As manager of web production for the X PRIZE Foundation I was attending CES to help work our booth in support of our launch announcement for the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. On a personal level I also was very curious about all the new health and fitness gadgets and services that would be announced.
Below is a video of Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs speaking at the CES keynote. If you forward to minute 58 you will see him bring Dr. Eric Topol onto the stage who then demonstrates several new health monitoring gadgets that are already available or coming soon. You can also see X PRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis announce and provide details about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE at the 1 hour, 8 minute mark.
This years’ CES showcased many new technologies that will appeal to both the Lifeloggers and increasingly the mainstream public as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get to walk the show floor very much but I have been monitoring all of the news coverage that has been coming out since the show. The competition for health and fitness tracking devices is really heating up. Early devices like the Fitbit and Bodymedia Fit saw some new players enter the market with the recent Jawbone Up as well as the Motorola MotoACTV device announced at CES. Then just 3 days ago right after the dust was settling at CES Nike announced the Fuelband which is similar to the Jawbone Up in that it is a device you wear on your wrist. In fact Digital Trends went ahead and wrote a post to compare the two similar devices. Then Mashable stated that “Nike also announced partnerships with Foursquare and Path.” I find this information very interesting since Path had hinted at offering the ability to integrate with the Jawbone Up in the future and now the Nike Fuelband announcement pretty much solidifies that, but also shows that they’re considering support for multiple devices. The integration of Lifestreaming and personal tracking devices is very exciting and Path will be a first mover in this area distinguishing their app from anything currently out there.
Even though I didn’t get to walk the show floor I was lucky to be working the Qualcomm booth next to Bodymedia’s Chris Knorr. I learned about updates to their service that will analyze the activity data to help provide recommendations and adjustments. They’re also releasing disposable patches in addition to the armband. I asked Chris what health related devices or services he had seen that were impressive at CES. The first thing he mentioned was the Macaw App which is aimed as a prevention plan based health app available for both iOS and Android. It’s supposed to provide the ability to be paired and synced with multiple wireless health devices and then import all the data in one place to provide a health profile. I downloaded the app but don’t yet see the ability to add 3rd party devices and didn’t find any details on their website about device support. Perhaps it was just announced and coming in the near future. On the surface it sounded somewhat like the health aggregation service I wrote about last May which I’m sure we’ll start to see several startups attacking very soon.
The other device and service that Chris told me about was Striiv. This device and service puts an emphasis on gamificaton to motivate people towards staying fit. Striiv does this by providing a pedometer device that has a built in display that ties in your activity to generate resources which you can use in a simulation game called MyLand. The other nice aspect is that you can also donate your activity to help various causes via GlobalGiving. The LA Times review called it “Sim City meets Wii Fit” which seems like an appropriate comparison. If you visit the link you can see a video demo of the unit.
Yesterday I read Dean Takahashi’s post stating that “Quantifying our lives will be a top trend in 2012″. It’s a great summary of some highlights of personal tracking devices at CES with his thoughts on the near future. I obviously couldn’t agree more with Dean and think these devices will continue to get better, cheaper, and continue to improve by analyzing the data to help improve our lives. This is going to be a great year for the health and fitness technology space and I’m really looking forward to it.
Health and Fitness Gadget Announcements from CES 2012
The gadgets and services for Lifelogging and practitioners of the Quantified Self continues to grow and evolve at a very fast pace. I made a trip to CES this year which was unique in that it provided a situation for my personal and work lives to collide. As manager of web production for the X PRIZE Foundation I was attending CES to help work our booth in support of our launch announcement for the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. On a personal level I also was very curious about all the new health and fitness gadgets and services that would be announced.
Below is a video of Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs speaking at the CES keynote. If you forward to minute 58 you will see him bring Dr. Eric Topol onto the stage who then demonstrates several new health monitoring gadgets that are already available or coming soon. You can also see X PRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis announce and provide details about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE at the 1 hour, 8 minute mark.
This years’ CES showcased many new technologies that will appeal to both the Lifeloggers and increasingly the mainstream public as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get to walk the show floor very much but I have been monitoring all of the news coverage that has been coming out since the show. The competition for health and fitness tracking devices is really heating up. Early devices like the Fitbit and Bodymedia Fit saw some new players enter the market with the recent Jawbone Up as well as the Motorola MotoACTV device announced at CES. Then just 3 days ago right after the dust was settling at CES Nike announced the Fuelband which is similar to the Jawbone Up in that it is a device you wear on your wrist. In fact Digital Trends went ahead and wrote a post to compare the two similar devices. Then Mashable stated that “Nike also announced partnerships with Foursquare and Path.” I find this information very interesting since Path had hinted at offering the ability to integrate with the Jawbone Up in the future and now the Nike Fuelband announcement pretty much solidifies that, but also shows that they’re considering support for multiple devices. The integration of Lifestreaming and personal tracking devices is very exciting and Path will be a first mover in this area distinguishing their app from anything currently out there.
Even though I didn’t get to walk the show floor I was lucky to be working the Qualcomm booth next to Bodymedia’s Chris Knorr. I learned about updates to their service that will analyze the activity data to help provide recommendations and adjustments. They’re also releasing disposable patches in addition to the armband. I asked Chris what health related devices or services he had seen that were impressive at CES. The first thing he mentioned was the Macaw App which is aimed as a prevention plan based health app available for both iOS and Android. It’s supposed to provide the ability to be paired and synced with multiple wireless health devices and then import all the data in one place to provide a health profile. I downloaded the app but don’t yet see the ability to add 3rd party devices and didn’t find any details on their website about device support. Perhaps it was just announced and coming in the near future. On the surface it sounded somewhat like the health aggregation service I wrote about last May which I’m sure we’ll start to see several startups attacking very soon.
The other device and service that Chris told me about was Striiv. This device and service puts an emphasis on gamificaton to motivate people towards staying fit. Striiv does this by providing a pedometer device that has a built in display that ties in your activity to generate resources which you can use in a simulation game called MyLand. The other nice aspect is that you can also donate your activity to help various causes via GlobalGiving. The LA Times review called it “Sim City meets Wii Fit” which seems like an appropriate comparison. If you visit the link you can see a video demo of the unit.
Yesterday I read Dean Takahashi’s post stating that “Quantifying our lives will be a top trend in 2012″. It’s a great summary of some highlights of personal tracking devices at CES with his thoughts on the near future. I obviously couldn’t agree more with Dean and think these devices will continue to get better, cheaper, and continue to improve by analyzing the data to help improve our lives. This is going to be a great year for the health and fitness technology space and I’m really looking forward to it.
May 15 2011
A Startup Opportunity for the Mint of Personal Activity Devices and Services for Health
Since I recently started testing out the Bodymedia armband I’ve also looked into other devices and the associated data and visualizations they provide. It got me thinking that as we start to incorporate several of these personal tracking devices and associated services into our lives, an opportunity to create a single dashboard will present itself. It’s not going to be efficient to have to visit multiple sites and manually stitch all the data together to provide a full picture of our on-going health initiatives. The opportunity for someone to aggregate this data in a simple way to paint the complete picture will become a very apparent and important missing link.
Some devices track multiple activities such as exercise and sleep such as Bodymedia and Fitbit, while others focus simply on one such as the Zeo which only tracks sleep and provides additional tracking metrics not available with the Fitbit or Bodymedia devices. Then there are other single minded devices and tracking services like Runkeeper and Nike+ for working out and the Withings scale and blood pressure monitor and many others that we would want incorporated into a complete tracking system (see list of items here). Beyond these devices there are plenty of other data sources that we would want to import from to provide more correlations for a complete health picture. Furthermore, there are things such as vitamin supplements, medicines, medical history and even additional genome analytics such as 23andme.com that would add much needed context to the data collected for relevancy over time. For example if you’re taking blood pressure medication or a sleeping aid you’d want that context along with your sleep patterns and blood pressure readings. It’s clear that there are many data points that need to be sewn together in a single service to help create a holistic picture of our health makeup.
Bodymedia armband dashboard provides several health related metrics
Mint.com set the bar when it came to tackling the very difficult aspect of connecting all of our financial footprints from bank accounts, to credit cards, to home loans, and investment accounts to provide a very clear and nearly real-time financial picture. I believe the same opportunity to do this with personal tracking devices, related services, and other contextual and historic data will present itself to create a real-time personal health picture. Building such a service will require the co-operation of existing device makers and their cloud data services to either open up or create API’s that can be integrated. I would imagine though that this wouldn’t be a very difficult barrier to convince support since it will be in the device maker’s best interest to provide the ability to connect their data to such a service as an added value for consumers. It would also provide a competitive distinction over other companies that don’t.
I’m extremely bullish on the ability for these devices and services to penetrate the mainstream over the next few years as the advantages become clear for using them. They provide great motivation for being able to quantify and improve our health and lives overall and with the breadth of devices and data collected an immediate need will present itself to make sense of all the information. Clearly the opportunity for a startup (or several) will emerge from this need and I’ll be the first in line to try them out. Here’s hoping that this blog post helps fuel them.
Sleep tracking from Bodymedia, Fitbit, and Zeo compared
A Startup Opportunity for the Mint of Personal Activity Devices and Services for Health
Since I recently started testing out the Bodymedia armband I’ve also looked into other devices and the associated data and visualizations they provide. It got me thinking that as we start to incorporate several of these personal tracking devices and associated services into our lives, an opportunity to create a single dashboard will present itself. It’s not going to be efficient to have to visit multiple sites and manually stitch all the data together to provide a full picture of our on-going health initiatives. The opportunity for someone to aggregate this data in a simple way to paint the complete picture will become a very apparent and important missing link.
Some devices track multiple activities such as exercise and sleep such as Bodymedia and Fitbit, while others focus simply on one such as the Zeo which only tracks sleep and provides additional tracking metrics not available with the Fitbit or Bodymedia devices. Then there are other single minded devices and tracking services like Runkeeper and Nike+ for working out and the Withings scale and blood pressure monitor and many others that we would want incorporated into a complete tracking system (see list of items here). Beyond these devices there are plenty of other data sources that we would want to import from to provide more correlations for a complete health picture. Furthermore, there are things such as vitamin supplements, medicines, medical history and even additional genome analytics such as 23andme.com that would add much needed context to the data collected for relevancy over time. For example if you’re taking blood pressure medication or a sleeping aid you’d want that context along with your sleep patterns and blood pressure readings. It’s clear that there are many data points that need to be sewn together in a single service to help create a holistic picture of our health makeup.
Bodymedia armband dashboard provides several health related metrics
Mint.com set the bar when it came to tackling the very difficult aspect of connecting all of our financial footprints from bank accounts, to credit cards, to home loans, and investment accounts to provide a very clear and nearly real-time financial picture. I believe the same opportunity to do this with personal tracking devices, related services, and other contextual and historic data will present itself to create a real-time personal health picture. Building such a service will require the co-operation of existing device makers and their cloud data services to either open up or create API’s that can be integrated. I would imagine though that this wouldn’t be a very difficult barrier to convince support since it will be in the device maker’s best interest to provide the ability to connect their data to such a service as an added value for consumers. It would also provide a competitive distinction over other companies that don’t.
I’m extremely bullish on the ability for these devices and services to penetrate the mainstream over the next few years as the advantages become clear for using them. They provide great motivation for being able to quantify and improve our health and lives overall and with the breadth of devices and data collected an immediate need will present itself to make sense of all the information. Clearly the opportunity for a startup (or several) will emerge from this need and I’ll be the first in line to try them out. Here’s hoping that this blog post helps fuel them.
Sleep tracking from Bodymedia, Fitbit, and Zeo compared
May 13 2011
Lifelogging Physical Activity and Sleep with the Bodymedia Armband
I was excited to discover the folks from Bodymedia who had a booth at the GDGT event at SXSW this year. In my coverage of devices used for Lifelogging, I continue to look for new gadgets in this arena. On the surface the Bodymedia armband sounded very similar to Fitbit in that it offers the ability to track physical activity and sleep. I’ve been testing one for a few weeks [Disclosure: Bodymedia sent me one] and being familiar with the Fitbit I was curious as to the differences compared to it. I asked the representative at the booth when I first saw it and they told me that main difference is that Bodymedia has sensors that allow it to measure several additional metrics. By visiting their website you can learn about what the sensors measure which include skin temperature, galvanic skin response, and heat flux which they state provide more accuracy and detailed picture than what a pedometer can provide. They also offer more details as to how Bodymedia differs from pedometers, accelerometers, and heart rate monitors as well.
Bodymedia is a device that bills itself primarily as a “weight management system” or device to help you lose weight. Beyond tracking just physical activity and sleep you can use their system to track calories consumed (manually) and it also can track calories burned and calculate your calorie balance daily against the goals you have setup within the system. I didn’t track that information as I was primarily interested in simply tracking my physical activity and sleep. However during the course of testing I discovered this interesting iPhone app called Meal Snap which allows you to take photos of food and have calorie count calculated from it. I may have to try this as the process of manually tracking calories is what prevents me from wanting to do it.
So I wore the device for 2 weeks straight. Wearing it was pretty comfortable. I was concerned that having it on basically 24/7 might become bothersome but it really wasn’t too bad. You just have to make sure to adjust the band to a comfort level depending on your current activity. For instance I’ll have it on a little tighter when I’m working out versus when I’m going to sleep. The battery lasts for a very long time, I never had it at a low level primarily because I was eagerly plugging it into my computer every day to upload the data collected. Publishing the data to the site is seamless after installing the software and creating an account on their website. They then import the data to provide some interesting activity charts.
For physical activity they provide 2 levels of tracking which include moderate activity and vigorous activity. For sleep they provide duration that is then broken down by lying down versus actual sleep to calculate your sleep efficiency. The graphs allow you to mouse over them to get more details as to the amount of time spent for each of the 2 levels that are tracked. Beyond the graphs they also keep a tally of special achievements based on your activity. This includes notifications for personal best scores by date and metrics for activity levels, calories burned, and sleep efficiency. You can so choose to brag about these achievements from the handy Facebook integration built into the service. They also offer a free iPhone and Android app so you can take your activity graphs with you on the go.
After using the device for a few days and uploading data I liked the interesting insights it offered. By providing a method of tracking your physical activity based on 2 levels of endurance, it sets a bar so that you can continually determine if your workouts are achieving the perceived goals you are expecting. In an attempt to make sure that I’m always maintaining or trying to exceed my previous activity levels it actually provides a strong motivation to work out hard so that I can quantify it when I import the data to my computer. I also found myself trying to work out harder to try and best my top achievements for each category. The device has aligned itself as a way to lose weight but I feel that’s limiting some of the larger benefits that it offers which is a motivational tool for working out and almost gamifying the experience. I’d actually like to see some more emphasis put towards offering features along those lines. I also wish they offered some more details around the data collected to educate me about it. For instance they state that moderate activity is 3-6 METs and vigorous activity is 6+ METs but they don’t offer any more details regarding this. It would be great to offer some helpful information to explain this to users. I also wouldn’t mind seeing more granular breakdowns of data. Same goes for the sleeping data.
When it comes to trying to incorporate these tracking devices into your life there are several considerations I think you need to make. A big one in my mind is those that can combine multiple features so to make the tracking as simple and ubiquitous as possible. For instance if you wanted to track activity and sleep you can also use two separate devices such as Runkeeper and Zeo but those require 2 separate interfaces as well as services to track the data whereas having one device to track both in a single service and interface may be more desirable. I find that attractive about the Bodymedia armband but of course then you may have to make a trade-off on features or determine if the data / value of one device offers more important tracking information to justify using separate devices. It’s not an easy determination so you should look into this before choosing one or more of the ones out there.
Overall I think incorporating a device like the Bodymedia armband will offer you some good benefits towards your health and ability to actually measure the effectiveness of your physical activity and sleep by being able to track it over time. I also found it to be quite a motivational tool for me as well which was an added bonus I wasn’t expecting. I personally see these types of devices gaining quite a large adoption rate over the coming years as they continue to improve and as we continue to incorporate more personal data collection into our lives.
Lifelogging Physical Activity and Sleep with the Bodymedia Armband
I was excited to discover the folks from Bodymedia who had a booth at the GDGT event at SXSW this year. In my coverage of devices used for Lifelogging, I continue to look for new gadgets in this arena. On the surface the Bodymedia armband sounded very similar to Fitbit in that it offers the ability to track physical activity and sleep. I’ve been testing one for a few weeks [Disclosure: Bodymedia sent me one] and being familiar with the Fitbit I was curious as to the differences compared to it. I asked the representative at the booth when I first saw it and they told me that main difference is that Bodymedia has sensors that allow it to measure several additional metrics. By visiting their website you can learn about what the sensors measure which include skin temperature, galvanic skin response, and heat flux which they state provide more accuracy and detailed picture than what a pedometer can provide. They also offer more details as to how Bodymedia differs from pedometers, accelerometers, and heart rate monitors as well.
Bodymedia is a device that bills itself primarily as a “weight management system” or device to help you lose weight. Beyond tracking just physical activity and sleep you can use their system to track calories consumed (manually) and it also can track calories burned and calculate your calorie balance daily against the goals you have setup within the system. I didn’t track that information as I was primarily interested in simply tracking my physical activity and sleep. However during the course of testing I discovered this interesting iPhone app called Meal Snap which allows you to take photos of food and have calorie count calculated from it. I may have to try this as the process of manually tracking calories is what prevents me from wanting to do it.
So I wore the device for 2 weeks straight. Wearing it was pretty comfortable. I was concerned that having it on basically 24/7 might become bothersome but it really wasn’t too bad. You just have to make sure to adjust the band to a comfort level depending on your current activity. For instance I’ll have it on a little tighter when I’m working out versus when I’m going to sleep. The battery lasts for a very long time, I never had it at a low level primarily because I was eagerly plugging it into my computer every day to upload the data collected. Publishing the data to the site is seamless after installing the software and creating an account on their website. They then import the data to provide some interesting activity charts.
For physical activity they provide 2 levels of tracking which include moderate activity and vigorous activity. For sleep they provide duration that is then broken down by lying down versus actual sleep to calculate your sleep efficiency. The graphs allow you to mouse over them to get more details as to the amount of time spent for each of the 2 levels that are tracked. Beyond the graphs they also keep a tally of special achievements based on your activity. This includes notifications for personal best scores by date and metrics for activity levels, calories burned, and sleep efficiency. You can so choose to brag about these achievements from the handy Facebook integration built into the service. They also offer a free iPhone and Android app so you can take your activity graphs with you on the go.
After using the device for a few days and uploading data I liked the interesting insights it offered. By providing a method of tracking your physical activity based on 2 levels of endurance, it sets a bar so that you can continually determine if your workouts are achieving the perceived goals you are expecting. In an attempt to make sure that I’m always maintaining or trying to exceed my previous activity levels it actually provides a strong motivation to work out hard so that I can quantify it when I import the data to my computer. I also found myself trying to work out harder to try and best my top achievements for each category. The device has aligned itself as a way to lose weight but I feel that’s limiting some of the larger benefits that it offers which is a motivational tool for working out and almost gamifying the experience. I’d actually like to see some more emphasis put towards offering features along those lines. I also wish they offered some more details around the data collected to educate me about it. For instance they state that moderate activity is 3-6 METs and vigorous activity is 6+ METs but they don’t offer any more details regarding this. It would be great to offer some helpful information to explain this to users. I also wouldn’t mind seeing more granular breakdowns of data. Same goes for the sleeping data.
When it comes to trying to incorporate these tracking devices into your life there are several considerations I think you need to make. A big one in my mind is those that can combine multiple features so to make the tracking as simple and ubiquitous as possible. For instance if you wanted to track activity and sleep you can also use two separate devices such as Runkeeper and Zeo but those require 2 separate interfaces as well as services to track the data whereas having one device to track both in a single service and interface may be more desirable. I find that attractive about the Bodymedia armband but of course then you may have to make a trade-off on features or determine if the data / value of one device offers more important tracking information to justify using separate devices. It’s not an easy determination so you should look into this before choosing one or more of the ones out there.
Overall I think incorporating a device like the Bodymedia armband will offer you some good benefits towards your health and ability to actually measure the effectiveness of your physical activity and sleep by being able to track it over time. I also found it to be quite a motivational tool for me as well which was an added bonus I wasn’t expecting. I personally see these types of devices gaining quite a large adoption rate over the coming years as they continue to improve and as we continue to incorporate more personal data collection into our lives.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
