The big players in fitness trackers have long since figured out that the big money will be in business-to-business sales; one big corporate contract can make an entire quarter. Fitbit has announced that Fitbit Wellness, its corporate offering, is now HIPAA-compliant, meaning the information it gathers and shares meets the U.S.-mandated privacy standard. It's an important … [Read more...]
Proteus, Otsuka, Submit First Wearable Drug to FDA
Frequent readers will know that Proteus Digital Health has been testing a wearable skin patch that monitors compliance with drug protocols. At last, three years after announcing the alliance, Proteus and its partner Otsuka have submitted for FDA approval an instrumented version of the anti-depressant Abilify. Although Proteus's Digital Health Feedback system had already been … [Read more...]
Ingestible Temperature Monitor Goes on Cross-Channel Swim
We got an e-mail this morning about the commercial launch of e-Celcius Performance, a connected pill that tracks the core temperature of the, ummm, wearer. Aimed at elite endurance athletes, the e-mail said Austrian swimmer Josef Kolbert would use the device on a swim across the English Channel today, August 25. The pill, from the French company BodyCap, monitors … [Read more...]
In-Ear Basal Thermometer Goes Kickstarter, But Beware the Science
Women who have difficulty getting pregnant frequently track their basal temperature -- the lowest body temperature of the day -- as an indication of when they are most fertile. (The lowest temp of the cycle is supposedly Go time.) One of the difficulties of getting an accurate reading is that your basal temperature is reached when you're asleep. YONO has started a … [Read more...]
Hands-on with Eargo, a New Approach to Hearing Aids
Hearing aids often meet with resistance from the very people who could use them most—either because they're not comfortable, they're too obvious, or they're too expensive. Startup Eargo` aims to transform the market by solving all three of these common issues. At first glance, you wouldn't even think Eargo is a hearing aid. The design, says co-founder Raphael Michel, … [Read more...]
Connected Health Services Market Will Be Nearly $2B by 2019, Says Juniper
More market projections from Juniper Research today, projecting that the connected health services market in 2019 will be six times what its estimated at today. The report, "Smart Wireless Devices: CE, Enterprise, Fitness, Healthcare, Payments 2015-2019," says that the market will partly be driven by a desire to track someone else's data -- a friend, or a parent, or to share … [Read more...]
Heath Tech Insider About That New York Times Article
It's sometimes hard to ignore dumb journalism, even when it comes from The New York Times. The usually smart columnist Nick Bilton wrote a titanically misguided column last week about the supposed health dangers of wearable tech. We were going to just hope it went away, but this is the Times we're talking about. Besides, Alfred Poor, who writes our sister newsletter Health … [Read more...]
Orgasm Tracker for Women
Let's try to be grown-ups here, OK? We all know about fitness trackers, and we've seen articles about various kinds of interactive women's underwear. Now here's a company that's using sensor technology -- admittedly not wearable, but still -- to track female sexual response. SmartBod, the product of a couple of entrepreneurs out of UC Berkeley, is a vibrator that tracks and … [Read more...]
US Government Sets Wearables Accelerator for Responders
First responders are an obvious, if difficult, market for wearable tech. Technical demands for responders are difficult to fulfill, governments don't have a lot of money, and purchase cycles are long. But where government money does flow, products follow. And government money is starting to flow to wearables. The US Department of Homeland Security has launched EMERGE!, an … [Read more...]
MWC Day 2: Wearables to Gain a Sense of Smell
There is such a thing as an electronic nose: technology that can detect gases and specify aromas. They can detect dangerous conditions of the "canary in a coal mine" variety, find hidden dead bodies, and analyze tastes. But the technology is bulky, expensive, and slow. Environmental analysis of that sort is one of those things that would be an obvious application for … [Read more...]