Fitbit's been trying for more than a year to get NFC payment technology into its products; we picked up a strong rumor a few months ago (which we were unable to adequately confirm) that Fitbit had built production quantities of a fitness tracker with payment tech but was unable to get it to work properly. Today comes news that Fitbit has bought the wearable payment tech … [Read more...]
About Dan Rosenbaum
Tata Group Develops Smart Watch For Its Own Enterprise Use
When you're as big as the Tata Group (and if you don't know about the company, you should read up on it), you can develop hardware products just for your own internal use. That's apparently what the company is doing with a piece of wristware building a safety watch for workers in several of its subsidiaries. The Economic Times of India reports that Tata CIO Gopichand … [Read more...]
Fitbit’s Road to Success Narrows
Wearable Tech Insider does not do stock or financial analysis, but Fitbit's 1Q results, released yesterday, said interesting things about the state of the company. Sales and earnings in the quarter beat analysts expectations, but the company's profit outlook for 2Q were a third to a half of what was expected. (Sales, however, were projected to be strong.) As a result, the … [Read more...]
Judge Tosses Jawbone Patents in Trade Fight with Fitbit
Remember that Jawbone and Fitbit were suing each other over patents and trade secrets and unfair hiring practices? Jawbone started the fight, but Fitbit's coming out better. A judge at the International Trade Commission yesterday tossed out Jawbone's patents, ruling that the company's patent on the very idea of gathering heath and sleep data is invalid. The ruling weakens … [Read more...]
Smart Clothing and Body Sensor Market to Hit 190 Million Units Through 2021, Says Tractica
The market research company Tractica says consumers will buy as many as 190 million pieces of what it categorizes as smart clothing and body sensors in the next five years. But they don't really say how that might happen. If you want detailed numbers, you'll have to pony up $3800 for the full report. (We're generally pretty skeptical of five-year market projections, which is … [Read more...]
Health Tech Companies Augmedix, BioBeats Announce Funding Rounds
Augmedix, a San Francisco-based EHR (electronic health record) company, has raised $17 million to incorporate Google Glass into its product, TechCrunch is reporting. Separately, BioBeats, which has a biometrics coaching app, says it's raised $2.25 million. Augmedix has an interesting model. A common complaint about AR visors in social situations is that they distract the … [Read more...]
A Rebooting Nokia Acquires Digital Health Pioneer Withings
Withings, the French digital health company best known for its Pop and Activé smartwatches and its connected scale, is being bought by Nokia for about €170 million, the companies said this morning. Withings will be the basis for a Nokia Digital Health business, and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year. Nokia, of course, was far and away the … [Read more...]
Faster Next Gen Apple Watch to Have Cellular SIM, Says WSJ
We're coming up on the first anniversary of the Apple Watch's announcement -- as opposed to its shipment -- so expect a lot of stories about its shortcomings, benefits, and future. The Wall Street Journal has one such, which cites "sources" as saying the next version of the watch will have a faster processor and be able to connect directly to cellular networks. Both guesses … [Read more...]
Fitbit Data Helps Save a Life
The Annals of Emergency Medicine isn't a journal we crack all the time around here, but it carries an article that describes how data collected by a patient's Fitbit Charge HR helped diagnose a life-threatening condition. The article's a bit technical, but the deal is that the patient showed up with cardiac arrhythmia. If the arrhythmia was chronic, one treatment was … [Read more...]
Wearable Tech Comes to Major League Baseball, But It’s a Secret
We confess to being lifelong Mets fans here (with an apostate Phillies backer on staff, but we don't talk to him), so we were happy to see that Major League Baseball is starting to embrace in-game wearable tech. The Associated Press has learned that MLB has approved the use during games of the Motus Baseball Sleeve and the Zephyr Bioharness. The former measures stress on a … [Read more...]