From augmented reality to fitness bands, 2014 saw investors aggressively backing wearable tech companies. In fact, the 10 largest wearable tech deals of the year took nearly $1B in funding.
Vitastiq is preparing to launch a new portable device that measures your body’s vitamin content by passing a sensor over your skin. It works with a smartphone app that shows you whether you need more vitamins and minerals.
The Zagreb, Croatia-based company has been working on the technology for two years, and it just launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise $49,000 for manufacturing and an Android app version.
Performance Lab’s CEO Waynne Dartnall repeated the point so many times it began to sound like a mantra: All the step counts, feet climbed, distance run, and calories burned data we’re collecting with our fitness wearables is just a bunch of numbers that don’t mean much. What we need is a system that translates the numbers into real, actionable insights in real time.
He’s right. There’s no shortage of apps and devices that generate numeric data but stop there. We need technology that interprets it all, but, so far, the attempts we’ve seen to do that have been clunky.
San Francisco-based Prana said its new wearable, which combines breath and posture tracking, can offer a unique look into your health and well-being.
The small round device clips into the inside of the user’s waistband. It uses a 3-axis accelerometer and a fancy set of fancy algorithms (which took two years to develop) to measure the body’s breathing patterns. It can also tell if you’re slouching.
You can use the information presented by the device’s app (Android and iOS) to train yourself to breathe properly and use better posture. Just doing this can yield a variety of health benefits like lower stress levels and no back pain, Prana said.
People shop mostly on their desktop computers—but they live on their smartphones. For marketers, effectively reaching their target audiences requires making a connection between those two worlds.
Marketers want to know how effective their ads are on mobile devices. They would also love to be able to retarget a mobile shopper who began making a purchase on that device, and then gave up before providing payment information and a delivery address.
Sweat, ick. It betrays our nervousness, leaves unsightly blotches on our clothes, drips down our faces, and makes us stink. Sure, it cools us when we overheat, but most of the time we think of it purely as an inconvenience.
We may soon, however, learn to like our sweat a lot more—or at least what it can reveal about our health. We’d certainly prefer giving a doctor a little sweat to being punctured for a blood test—or even providing a urine sample—as long as we didn’t have to run a mile or sit in a sauna to do it. And if sweat could provide constant updates about our bodies’ reactions to a medication, or track head trauma in athletes, we might just start to appreciate it.
Deals in the space increased by 135% in 2013 and funding has already hit an annual record in 2014 (in only 8 months). Will Apple's moves in the space and some already big exits spur more investment into the space?
Almost 60 million fitness trackers will be in use by 2018, tripling the number of the devices used this year, says a new research report from Juniper Research.
The firm says fitness trackers like the Fitbit Charge and the Jawbone UP24 will triple to about 57 million in use in the wild worldwide by 2018, up from just 19 million this year.
Fitness trackers abound, and though there is a big market for them, wearables companies are looking for ways to stand out from the crowd.
Atlas Wearables has designed a fitness wristband that closely monitors the wearer’s form when doing things like pushups, curls, and squats. It compares the user’s form against a library of “ideal” motions for a variety of exercises and suggests improvements.
Imagination Technologies is unveiling a dual-core processor for wearable devices such as smartwatches today.
The MIPS-based Ingenic Newton2 platform and Ingenic M200 wearable chip offer an easy way for device makers to create the electronic innards of a wearable device, such as a smartwatch. The new module reduces the area and power required by 50 percent, and it has a MIPS-based processor that is specifically designed for wearable devices, which need enough performance to power a display but also need to operate on low battery consumption.
