Pristine builds telepresence enterprise and healthcare applications around wearable technology. Like many companies, it built its first round of products around Google Glass -- understandable as Google was the best-publicized visual wearable, but an unfortunate choice as Glass has retrenched. There are other (and better) visor solutions, though. With Glass off the market for … [Read more...]
Improvements to Microsoft Band, But You Still Can’t Buy One
Microsoft continues to tweak the software behind its Band health tracker, Paul Thurott reports, but you still can't actually buy one. The software and gaming giant put a limited number of Band devices on sale at the end of last year as part of what it is now saying was a soft launch. There's no word on when more of them will be available, or through what channels. If … [Read more...]
Storing Your Data in Your DNA
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...]
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...]
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...]
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...]
FDA Issues Draft Guidance on Wearables; Requests Comments
Unless you're a devoted reader of the Federal Register, you may have missed the Food & Drug Administration's recent guidance about what the agency really cares about when it comes wearable technology. The guidance, titled “General Wellness: Policy for Low Risk Devices,” is meant not only for the wearables industry, but for FDA staff in the Center for Devices and … [Read more...]