Goji Play: Gamify Your Halloween Calories Off!

Into the Dead zombie game (above) is another spooky game Goji Play has partnered with in time for Halloween.

I first wrote about Goji Play last December, and since then they have more than tripled the number of games linked to the platform. The device and fitness wearable attaches to any cardio machine to track workout metrics. The data relays back to a tablet or phone, which can be sync’d to any one of Goji’s games. The faster you move, the better you play in the game.

For those of you indulging in a couple pieces of Halloween chocolate, note how many calories these fun sizes can add up to! Here are the number of games (and minutes of cardio) it takes to burn off some of the top Halloween candies:

Goji Play comes with wireless controllers and a clip on activity sensor. Compatible games are available on any iOS device. At less than $100, Goji Play transforms any piece of cardio equipment into a gaming machine. Available at bluegoji.com or Amazon.com today.

June: An Elegant Way to Protect Your Skin From Sun Damage

Netatmo’s June is a connected cosmetic device that protects skin from sun damage. It is an elegant bracelet that has UVA and UVB sensors to collected sun exposure data and transmit coverage recommendations to a mobile app. The app has a basic understanding of the user’s skin type (asks 6 initial questions including hair color, eye color, how do you usually tan, etc.), and based on the World Health Organization’s skin and sun criteria, the app calculates your daily sun dose percentage.

The device is meant to be a luxury piece that doesn’t interfere with your lifestyle, but instead enhances it. The app sends you alerts when you should reapply sunscreen, can tell you when to wear sunglasses or a hat, and can be pre-set to inform you when your sun exposure reaches certain levels.

Netatmo’s mission is to monitor the environment to create a healthier lifestyle through connected home and connected beauty (other products include a weather station and thermostat). As Eléonore de Fournas, PR Manager explains, “The bracelet is designed for women and targets users who may not always have sun exposure on their minds as they go about their daily lives – when they go to work, have lunch, practice an outdoor activity, or send their kids to school. It’s for women who want to take care of their skin, and prevent skin damage.”

Virginie Golicheff, Head of Communications emphasizes, “It’s really a sun coach – we wanted the design to be nice and more closely related to a piece of jewelry than a tracker. We want to teach people about their skin and educate them around UV exposure.”

It’s surprising how much sun exposure one gets after eating lunch for 30 minutes outside – almost the full 100% if there isn’t cloud coverage or if the user hasn’t applied sunscreen. Eléonore elaborates, “It’s shocking how much sun you get without noticing – and especially when it’s a bit cloudy, people really don’t think about UVA, UVB on your skin – but with June you can see that skin damage happens regardless of direct exposure.”

June has a one month battery life before recharge, which supports the goal of not being too intrusive. It is also water resistant. You can order it now from the website.

Moov: A Smart Fitness Coach That Challenges and Improves Your Fitness

Moov is a new wearable that combines fitness tracking with real-time audio coaching. The device can be worn on your wrist or ankle* and sync’d with various apps depending on workout type. Moov is currently compatible with running, cycling, cardio boxing, and swimming. The device transmits your data (for running it includes stride length, impact, cadence, range of motion, etc.) to the app for analysis, and the app transmits in-the-moment feedback via your headphones. For instance, the feedback can tell you to shorten your stride to save energy so you can run faster, to land more softly, to swing your arms up and down (and not side to side), or to run with your shoulders back for better posture.

Running with Moov was fun – the coaching was unobtrusive but still effective. I changed my form while using it, opting for quicker shorter strides rather than large lunging ones to improve efficiency and stamina.

Based on your interval level performance, the app suggests higher or lower levels to try. It keeps track of all your data points so you can compare your progress over time.

*I wanted to test ankle vs. wrist accuracy for the device. I wore Moov on my wrist to do levels 3, 6, 9. The coaching worked great but when I stopped to end the workout on my phone it couldn’t find the Moov on my wrist – perhaps it was because I wasn’t moving it around enough when I stopped – and it lost all the data on that set. For best use and precision in running, I would suggest wearing it on your ankle. It’s light enough to ignore and small enough so it doesn’t affect stride length.

The data tracking on the Moov is excellent, which is a testament to the founding team – Nikola Hu, a former Apple and HALO game engineer, Meng Li and Tony Yuan. The company plans to roll out apps for other activities and uses going forward, and an Android app is slated for November 2014 launch. The second batch is available for pre-order now.

 

Kurbo: Mobile Lifestyle App for Kids and Teens

Kurbo is a mobile app targeted towards kids and teens to help them learn about and maintain healthy eating and exercising habits. The app teaches kids about nutrition, labeling foods as green (good to eat anytime), yellow (eat in moderation), and red (eat sparingly).

Games on the app teach users about serving size and portions, and about exercise intensities. The program comes with a weekly coaching session to help provide additional support. Users set their goals and use Kurbo to help structure and plan for the week ahead.

If a user is allotted 35 reds a week and is attending a birthday party on Saturday, he can plan ahead by eating less “red” foods during the week so that he can fit in eating cake on Saturday (cake is definitely a red food). Kurbo doesn’t impose set diets on children, instead it gives them the ability to portion their calories and make small changes for themselves. Initially licensed from Stanford University and stress tested by SUNY Buffalo research, Kurbo aims to be a wellness and lifestyle app for children and teens, and lets them make decisions versus imposing rules. With this approach, 80% of Kurbo users lose weight. You can download Kurbo now for iOS devices.

Apps For Today’s Modern Nurse

I attended the UCSF School of Nursing Commencement last night and was reminded of how selfless and hardworking nurses are. Congratulations to all grads – and special thanks to the ones focused on health and wellness.

Healthcare is a demanding industry to be in, especially as a service provider. There are more and more apps that have become available in recent years to aid doctors and nurses, with a few comprehensive lists located here:

25 Best Nursing Apps (Rasmussen)

Top Nursing Apps (Soliant Health)

104 Apps Every Nurse Should Be Using (OnlineLPNtoRN.org)

Alexisavvy continues to be focused on consumer apps and products, but we acknowledge the wealth of provider apps out there. Better support for practitioners means better and more accurate quality of care for all.

StethoCloud: A Connected Stethoscope for Parents and Doctors Alike

Dr. Andrew Lin and Dr. Hon Weng Chong, founders of StethoCloud, have designed and built an inexpensive smartphone stethoscope that can be used by parents and doctors alike. The device is easy enough for a parent to use at home and cheap enough so that a doctor can use it in the developing world to diagnose diseases like pneumonia. The Company started from a winning entry into the 2012 Microsoft Australian Imagine Cup – a student technology competition. StethoCloud has come a long way since their first prototype and Andrew has answers to some of our questions below.

A: How did you decide to create a modern stethoscope?  

AL: As doctors, Hon and I have always believed that in the future, an explosion of data will help medical professionals make better informed decisions, with far more leverage on their time than today. For this to happen, we realized that we needed prolific sensors that can collect the data required. We decided on the stethoscope because the data is extremely rich, containing powerful diagnostic information, which can diagnose a broad range of respiratory and heart conditions. Initially, we entered Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition as a student project, where we focused on pneumonia.

 

A: What is the vision and mission of StethoCloud? 

AL: Connected diagnostic devices for consumers, and a software platform to help drive in-home healthcare delivery.

 

A: Who is your target audience for the product? 

AL: Initially, we plan to market our product to parents of young children. This is because respiratory illnesses are extremely common (e.g. croup, bronchiolitis, asthma) and a connected stethoscope will become a valuable tool that can help parents get advice remotely, especially on transient events such as asthma attacks. Beyond this, the tool is also useful for those with chronic illnesses or under care.

 

A: What are the main differentiators of StethoCloud versus what is currently available in the market that makes it such an industry game changer?

AL: We have designed the device for consumers and the interface is easy to use. It will be much cheaper than existing devices. In the future, we plan to roll out algorithms that provide analytics and help with decision support.

 

A: How will StethoCloud work with other applications to paint the picture of health for an individual?

AL: It’s early days, but we plan to develop APIs to allow cross-platform integration.

 

Rise: Affordable and Reliable Personal Nutrition Coaching

Rise is a new nutrition coaching app that makes it affordable to have structured, personal, and specialized nutrition coaching. Your personal diet coach gives you daily feedback and advice based on what you eat and what types of habits you keep. The feedback is tailored to each individual’s changing lifestyle.

The app makes interacting with a personal nutritionist easy. By taking photos of every snack and meal, you are giving your nutritionist a reliable way to shape your diet in real time. The app itself is well designed, although taking pictures of every meal takes a little getting used to. My coach was friendly and experienced. The personal attention I got made me more cognizant of what I was eating and when. After spending several days in Las Vegas and eating haphazardly, her appraisals of my meals made me focus on eating fruits and vegetables upon arriving back at home. The coaching works – and the native interface doubles as a food diary. It’s definitely an app to try on the way to modifying eating habits for the better.

Gero Lab: Using Everyday Movement to Predict Risk of Age-Related Diseases

Locomotome, as coined by the Human Locomotome Project is a set of human locomotive data that can be analyzed to predict human stress levels and proclivity of age-related metabolic or degenerative disorders.

Gero Lab, a new and burgeoning company in this space, has been collecting locomotome data to discover markers of age-related diseases and evaluate the clinical importance of these markers. They have an app that collects initial answers to health questions and then uses activity data from devices like FitBit, Jawbone, and Bodymedia to further cement their locomotome models. Users are then sent metrics on their neurological state and potential health conditions, increasing their awareness of various health factors important for early prevention and lifestyle changes.

Gero co-founder Vera Kozyr answers some of my questions below.

What was the driving force to create Gero? What are the company’s goals?

We were originally studying different biological signals including transcriptome and genome signals, looking for signatures of aging and associated chronic deceases. Then we realized that the locomotome signal is extremely rich and much more convenient to gather, so we adjusted all our mathematical models and algorithms for it. The goal of our company is to create a convenient (non-invasive and seamless) and reliable tool for the early stage diagnosis of different diseases.

How can data collected and used in Gero models be translated into action items for users?

Awareness is very important when it comes to health. Early warnings can be impactful, especially for slowly developing health conditions. For example, life-style changes during the early stages of diabetes type 2 can significantly slow down the development of the disease or even reverse it. In the future, after passing FDA approval, GERO technology could also be used by doctors for preventative measures.

What are some of the most interesting bits of data that you have gathered so far? What is to come?

The key takeaways of our first 3,000 Fitbit study (finished in November of last year) are:

• Motor activity contains signatures of particular chronic deceases (metabolic, psychiatric and neurological)
• Low-resolution trackers (e.g. Fitbit, Jawbone, etc.) can also be used with GERO’s mathematical model with sufficient tracking time
• We are already passed the proof of concept phase to detect particular health conditions with accuracy

We keep working on increasing the accuracy of our algorithms. Along with disease risks and trends, we have learned to detect biological age and gender. At the moment we are focusing on diabetes and soon will publish some of our very interesting findings.

How does the app / data interface help users?

As we are still in the research stage we don’t claim that our app helps users at the moment. It collects activity data and helps to develop our technology. Individual health reports that we will release to our participants of course might potentially help by giving awareness of health conditions and showing their trends.

CarePredict: Monitoring Aging Parents for the Tech Generation

Millions of Americans take care of their aging parents while managing work and raising their own families. These adults are part of the ‘Sandwich Generation,’ and are constantly on call to help ailing family members. One of the toughest and most time consuming activities to do as a part-time informal caretaker is to track behaviors and note subtle day-to-day fluctuations that might hint towards bigger issues. CarePredict, founded by Satish Movva, founder of ContinuLink, is a wearable device company that assists adult children in tracking their aging parents’ health and activities.

The Tempo is the company’s first device, which tracks the wearer’s location within the home and learns their normal pattern of movement. Cleverly named, when there is a potential concerning change to the users daily tempo (in activities such as standing, walking, and sitting), the device notifies all caregivers in a text or email about the discrepancy.

The sensor is easy to wear and detects different motions. This motion data is transmitted wirelessly to the CarePredict beacon, which understands the location of the user and sends all the data from the wearable to CarePredict’s servers for analysis. The data can be monitored from an online account or smartphone app. CarePredict, currently taking pre-orders, is slated to launch next month.

Pact: Beautiful Redesign Incentivizes You to Keep Healthy Habits

Pact (formerly GymPact) relaunched this year with a new name and new features. The app penalizes you ($5 charge minimum per missed event), for not reaching your pre-set fitness, eating, and diet goals. On the flip side, you are monetarily rewarded for every goal you do reach.

For exercise, you can check into a gym, use apps like RunKeeper and Moves, or activity trackers like the Jawbone UP or Fitbit devices to measure your steps. For fruit and veggie tracking, you take a photo of your meal and post it on Pact to be reviewed and accepted/declined by others in the Pact community. The diet portion requires you to track your meals using MyFitnessPal.

The new app is designed cleanly and is easy to use, updating information from trackers and apps almost immediately. Weekly emails confirm how much you owe vs. earned.

Pact isn’t failsafe and people who want to cheat by checking into gyms they pass on the street or entering bogus meal info into MyFitnessPal can still earn the $0.10 to $0.30 per event – but with such low dollar values, it’s not worth it. With Pact I check my UP steps throughout the day, making sure that I get to 10,000 steps before the day is over because in the end it isn’t earning 25 cents that matters to me, but losing the $10. Pact is slowly changing my habits and it’s a great way to kickstart a health goal.