In the latest sign of consolidation in the wearables market, Mattel, the toy giant that's home to Barbie and Hot Wheels, has bought Sproutling, the wearable baby monitor company. Sproutling makes an ankle bracelet that tracks a baby's heart rate, skin temperature, motion, and position; it works with a camera, base station and app. Price was not announced, but the Silicon … [Read more...]
Oral Roberts Students Are Required to Wear Fitbits
Oral Roberts University has long had a fitness requirement for first-year students but a written activity log sufficed until this academic year. Now, all 900 incoming freshmen have to wear Fitbit trackers (which they have to buy) and share the data with the school. The Tulsa World newspaper (Oral Roberts is in Tulsa, OK) reports that professors had previously been required … [Read more...]
Consumer Reports Validates Fitbit’s Heart Rate Tracker
The day Fitbit announced the Blaze tracker at CES, a class-action lawsuit harshed the company's buzz. (That, and an 18 percent drop in its stock price.) The claim was the heart rate monitor on the Fitbit Charge HR and Surge were inaccurate enough to cause harm. Fitbit pointed to its disclaimers, saying the monitor wasn't meant to be a medical device after all. Maybe Fitbit … [Read more...]
Doctors Develop Dissolving Brain Pressure Sensors
The Atlantic has a really interesting article about doctors in the Midwest working on pressure sensors that can be implanted in patients' brains, and which are absorbed by the body after they're no longer useful. From the article: It consists of a membrane made from PLGA, a polymer regularly used in medical devices, suspended in a frame of silicon and magnesium. The pressure … [Read more...]
What’s Apple Doing With Healthcare, Anyway?
Buzzfeed has noticed that Apple's put out some job postings for people who know about biosensors and non-invasive measurements. Does that mean Apple is planning new products in the healthcare market? Yes. No. Maybe. (Pick one.) CEO Tim Cook told the Telegraph late last year that he doesn't want the Apple Watch to get so sophisticated that it draws the attention of the FDA … [Read more...]
iTENS: Portable Pain Relief without Pills: CES
Chronic pain is an unwelcome and debilitating part of life for millions people, and the side effects from medications and therapies often just make things worse, adding nausea, fatigue, and possible drug dependency to the mix. iTENS, LLC, an Ohio-based company, is hoping to change that with Bluetooth-based electrotherapy. TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) … [Read more...]
L’Oreal and MC10 Team Up on Beauty Tech: CES
The cosmetics firm L'Oreal is not one you'd expect to see at a CES, which skews heavily to the electronic. Yet here is Guive Balooch, Global VP of its Technology Incubator, sitting with MC10 Co-founder Roozbeh ("Rooz") Ghaffari, both of them sporting blue heart-shaped stickers on their hands. Those stickers, they explain, track exposure to the sun, but do it in two … [Read more...]
Withings Announces Connected Temporal Thermometer: CES Day -2
Withings, maker of the popular Activé line of dual-dial smartwatches and a line of connected health appliances, has announced a temporal thermometer, the Thermo. It works by pressing the device to a patient's temple, pressing a button, and holding the device steady for two seconds, until it vibrates slightly. The temperature, measured by an array of 16 infrared sensors … [Read more...]
Wearable Claims to Reduce Nausea: CES Day -1
If you suffer from motion or morning sickness, you are probably familiar with surprisingly effective over-the-counted elastic bands that suppress nausea by pressing against a nerve on the inside of your wrist. ReliefBand Technologies is at CES with an electronic version of that, an FDA-cleared device that claims to send specific patterns and intensities to help settle your … [Read more...]
TempTraq Debuts 48-Hour Continuous Temperature Monitoring Patch: CES Day -2
Taking your temperature is a simple thing, but is essentially a one-time act that's repeated as desired. TempTraq, a $20 connected device from Blue Spark Technologies, deploys a surprising amount of technology to track your temperature for up to two days -- and make it sharable as you need it to be. The TempTraq is a patch that the user activates with a smartphone app via … [Read more...]