Venture funding to wearables startups surpassed $2.2B across the past five years, accrued over 195 deals. With such a competitive investing landscape for wearables, it’s important to know where to top VCs are placing their bets.
If the current trend persists, funding for wearable computing startups will be down sharply after a boom year in 2014.
The wearable computing industry has seen important activity this year on the public markets side. In March, Apple’s smartwatch was released, with some estimates pegging the device’s sales at 20% of all wearables units sold globally in Q2’15. In June, fitness band maker Fitbit went public at a valuation of $4.1B.
Make way for another wearable. Launching sign-ups for its alpha program on stage today, here at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, is a startup called Humon — which is building a real-time lactic acid threshold monitor designed for endurance athletes to help them tailor training to their personal limits.
Two of the co-founders behind Humon met at MIT and MIT Sloan, where the team has also this year been through a summer accelerator program — taking in a $20,000 equity-free grant from MIT to help with product development. They’ve otherwise been bootstrapping development thus far.
Electrical engineers at UC San Diego have reported a new wireless communication technique that uses magnetic fields to transmit ultra low-power signals through the human body.
Your doctor may not want your Fitbit numbers, or so read a recent VentureBeat story. Perhaps many of us doctors are working so hard to figure out how to get reimbursed by Obamacare that we don’t have the time to think about disruptive technologies.
That’s a pity, as the Affordable Care Act – while transformative – is not the only structural force taking hold in healthcare. The other major trend is the move to a precision medicine model, one that will welcome Fitbits and whatever other wearable technologies hit the market in the future.
Until recently, I didn’t know a thing about how my roughly 25-minute bike commute across San Francisco—or any other part of my day, really—affects my body, other than that I inevitably arrive at work sweaty and a bit out of breath when I’m in a big rush. How high is my heart rate? Do my sleep habits affect it? How many calories do I burn?
These questions have been on my mind as a number of activity trackers and smart watches have hit store shelves over the past couple of years, promising to track information like steps, sleep, heart rate, sun exposure, and calories. With one of these sensor-filled gadgets on my wrist, surely I could get accurate information about my body.
Microsoft is tempting more developers to build for its fitness-tracking wristband through boosting its software development kit (SDK) with Microsoft Band Web Tiles and Microsoft Health Cloud APIs (previews).
Until recently, I didn’t know a thing about how my roughly 25-minute bike commute across San Francisco—or any other part of my day, really—affects my body, other than that I inevitably arrive at work sweaty and a bit out of breath when I’m in a big rush. How high is my heart rate? Do my sleep habits affect it? How many calories do I burn?
These questions have been on my mind as a number of activity trackers and smart watches have hit store shelves over the past couple of years, promising to track information like steps, sleep, heart rate, sun exposure, and calories. With one of these sensor-filled gadgets on my wrist, surely I could get accurate information about my body.
