Wello: Your Very Own Vital Sign Monitor

Azoi, a healthcare technology company, is now taking pre-orders for their first product release, Wello. Wello is a vital sign monitoring device embedded within a mobile phone case. Users place their fingers on the top and back of the case with the screen held horizontally, display pointed towards them. The Wello app displays captured and calculated health stats, which can also be shared with family, friends, and caregivers. Data include blood pressure, electrocardiography (ECG), heart rate, blood oxygen, temperature, lung function and more. By improving health awareness, the creators of Wello hope that it can help users make more informed lifestyle choices.

According to the World Health Organization, 347 million people have diabetes, heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, and hypertension afflicts nearly a billion people globally. Wello aims to combat these trends by encouraging regular monitoring as a preventative measure, empowering users with the knowledge to identify potential issues and seek advice before they become serious illnesses.

Key Factors Wello Measures:

• Blood Pressure: Monitors blood pressure easily and accurately. More importantly with multiple readings you begin to see patterns that cause spikes or dips.
• ECG: Takes an ECG reading without all the fussy wires. An ECG is nothing but mapping the electrical signals of the heart.
• Heart Rate: Measures and keeps a track of your heart rate or pulse. Your pulse provides glimpses into your state of fitness, potential heart problems or other illnesses.
• Blood Oxygen: Helps measure your blood oxygen levels, which if low can be dangerous.
• Temperature: Quickly and easily reads body temperature with the welcome convenience of tracking it. So you know how a fever behaves over time.
• Lung Function: Reads how much air you can inhale and exhale which may point towards possible obstructions or underlying conditions.

Wello plans to ship in Fall 2014, pending FDA approval.

 

Noom: Weight Loss is Better Together

Noom is a wellness company that recently launched their first iPhone app, Noom Weight. Unlike other food-tracking apps, Pro users are automatically put into a Noom chat group with other users, creating a small community of people who are ‘on your side.’ In the group, you can track each member’s meals and comment on their decisions throughout the day. The community also encourages people to share tips and share photos/recipes of their meals, creating an environment focused on eating well. The simplicity of logging foods into the app makes it easy to be consistent.

The company also has Noom Walk and Noom Cardio – both on Andriod devices, to help track steps and workouts. Noom is great for Andriod users – it combines data on both eating and exercise habits onto one central backend, but for iOS users, Noom Weight is the only app currently available.

Difficulties in Making Wearables, Because Hardware is Hard

A number of reports on Nike restructuring their FuelBand division came out this past week. The fitness giant confirmed layoffs in its Digital Sports division and as CNET reported, “As early as this fall, Nike planned on releasing another iteration of the FuelBand — an even slimmer version — but cancelled the project. And it appears to have shelved all future physical product projects under the Digital Sport helm, the person familiar with the matter added.” Re/code wrote about the matter on Friday, with their sources saying that “the decision over what to do has been debated for months within the company, due to high expenses, manufacturing challenges and the inability to make adequate margins on the business. In addition, sources note that Nike has been unable to attract as high a level of engineering talent as the business has grown.”

Jawbone’s 2011 recall of its first UP band, and Fitbit’s recent recalls of their Force band are other indications that making small wrist wearables isn’t easy.

Over the weekend, I played around with an Arduino, creating a ‘wearable’ by hooking up a display, 3-axis accelerometer, temperature sensor, vibrating motor, pulse sensor, and battery. With help from the team at iRoboticist, I was able to put together a working prototype. Thinking through all the parts in these devices gave me new appreciation for all the work that wearables-focused hardware and software engineers do – while balancing high consumer expectations (battery life length, water resistance, size, display quality…and the list goes on). Aside from building, there’s also managing the supply chain and handling the manufacturing aspect of the product cycle, which can often be tedious and unnerving.

Here are some neat teardowns of common wearables from iFixit (Fitbit Flex), Chipworks (Nike FuelBand), and iFixit (Pebble smartwatch). These sites give you a great inside look at all the components jammed into the thing you are wearing on your wrist.

The technology here has come a long way. Kudos to all the companies that continue to prioritize and innovate on wearable devices.