It is perhaps the ultimate in wearable technology: carrying data not just with you, but as part of you. Scientists have apparently had significant replicable success with encoding data within your DNA. Not just a little data, either: petabytes and exabytes, and it seems to be quite durable. There are, of course, about a bazillion questions here. Expense and practicality are … [Read more...]
Wearable Bananas and Tomatoes Come to the Tokyo Marathon
This weekend is the Tokyo Marathon, which looks like a serious race despite experiments with race-ready wearable bananas and tomatoes. Yes, you read that right. Dole, the world's largest supplier of fruits and vegetables, has apparently been a long-time sponsor of the race. This year, besides handing out bananas to runners, the company is tricking out a couple of bananas … [Read more...]
WSJ: Apple to Make 5 Million Watches, But Not Sure Why
With Mobile World Congress and its attendant blizzard of news about all things mobile coming up in a couple of weeks, Apple is newsbombing the proceedings with leaks about the forthcoming Apple Watch. The Wall Street Journal has carried a couple of interesting pieces in the last day. One article puts the initial production run at 5 million units. The other, more interesting, … [Read more...]
Health Wearables Face Big Challenges With Big Data
Pam Baker is one of our favorite writers about big data and health tech, and she pulls the two strands together nicely in an article that talks about how hard it is to get meaningful healthcare data out of wearables. The problem, she argues, isn't so much one of use case as it is one of data standards. Every database has its own needs and expectations, and they in turn … [Read more...]
New Wearable Seeks Human Guinea Pigs
While we're talking about FDA guidelines and resistance to them, our sister site Health Tech Insider carries an interesting story about someone looking for test subjects for a new wearable band. The developers plainly understand that they will, at some point, need to get approval from the FDA but they want a few people to see if their version of electrical muscle stimulation is … [Read more...]
Congress Being Pushed to Limit FDA on Wearable Med Tech
We wrote last week about the FDA taking comments on its regulations regarding wearable health technology. The excellent Politico weighs in today with a story about how Congress is being pressed to limit -- by law -- what the FDA is allowed to regulate. Politico traces some of the money, noting that Intel spent $1.5 million last year lobbying on "telehealth wearables, remote … [Read more...]
Two New Tech Bras: One To Control Music, The Other To Detect Cancer
By some cosmic confluence, two proposals for tech bras crossed our desk this morning: one for a bra that can adjust your music to match your heart rate, and one that hopes to detect breast cancer early. The Keep Beat bra, from British designer Victoria Sowerby, does the usual heart rate detection, but then sends your data to an app that slows and speeds your music depending … [Read more...]
Android Wear Has 5 Percent of the Smartband Market, Less Than Pebble, Says Canalys
Remember when Android Wear was going to take over the smart band market? Hasn't happened yet, according to market research firm Canalys. The company says 740,000 Android Wear devices shipped in 2014, out of a total 4.6 million smart bands. (Keep in mind that Wear-based devices only were available in the second half of the year, though.) Pebble alone shipped 1 million units … [Read more...]
Engadget Review of Healbe GoBe: Not a Fraud, but Not a Winner Either
The first in-depth review of an early production model of the Healbe GoBe is out from Engadget, and it's ... well, it's not as bad as a lot of people expected. The GoBe is likely the most controversial wearable to come down the pike. It had a hugely over-subscribed crowdfunding campaign, based on its claim that it could monitor caloric intake and glucose levels … [Read more...]
JAMA Says Fitbit Makes The Most Accurate Fitness Tracker, But It’s Not The One You Think
The apparent inaccuracy of wearable fitness trackers has long bugged us, but we had been unable to put real scientific numbers to it. Fortunately, there are real researchers in the world, and they've established scientifically that most of the step-counting data you get from trackers is pretty bad. A letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association -- as mainstream … [Read more...]