FreeWavz: Wire-free Smart Earphones with Built-in Fitness Monitoring

FreeWavz, wireless smart earphones with immersive sound quality and medical-grade fitness monitoring precision has launched their Kickstarter campaign today.

FreeWavz combines the uniqueness of distraction free, stable (here’s a video of a gymnast with them on) wireless earphones with an expansive suite of health metrics tracking – including heart rate, calories burned, distance traveled, duration of workout, and oxygen saturation. The technology and design aim to give the most accurate readings. Other earbud-type wireless earphones are unable to match the accuracy of FreeWavzs because they only have a front sensor. By wrapping around the ear, FreeWavz pulse oximeters can sense the amount of red and infra-red light traveling through the earlobe, and then collect the feedback with a second behind-the-ear sensor, giving more precise oxygen and heart rate readings.

FreeWavz founder, Dr. Eric Hensen, is an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Having worked with hard-of-hearing patients, Dr. Hensen brought his practical experience into creating FreeWavz, stating “This product was born out of customer feedback – from people in the gym, to those who bike and run, to patients complaining about traditional headphones – this product was made by combining user feedback and experience together.”

Also unlike earbuds, which block the ear canal (and are often jammed into the ear, causing discomfort while distorting the sound), FreeWavz projects sound into the ear canal, letting the canal “breath,” and in turn delivering crisper sound.

The two earpiece devices connect to a mobile app via Bluetooth, and each earpiece can be individually calibrated for frequency and volume. Additionally, users can use FreeWavz to answer phone calls and the earphones can be adjusted for environmental listen-through to accommodate busy street noise.

President & Chief Financial Officer Harry Ericson calls FreeWavz, “Google Glass for the ears,” because of the product’s expansive usability and reach. While it is now launched as a fitness wearable, potential future applications include use while driving (transmitting GPS directions), traveling (guided tour audio), or learning (classroom/education).

Go to Kickstarter to reserve your pair today; shipments planned beginning this October.

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.

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.

Skulpt: Quantify Your Muscle Strength and Definition

The Skulpt Aim is the first-ever non-invasive wireless device that measures the composition and quality of muscles. When you press it against major muscle groups, the device’s sensors collect thousands of data points to measure fat percentage and muscle quality in individual muscles as well as in the body as a whole.

MQ, or muscle quality, is a measure of your muscles’ strength and definition. The higher the MQ, the stronger and more defined a person’s body is. Recent articles have noted the dangers of being “Skinny Fat,” or being thin but not toned. Time said, “thin people can sometimes carry the most dangerous kind of fat – and not know it.” The Aim assesses the body by measuring four major muscles (biceps, triceps, abs, and thighs), to create an accurate estimate of your total body fat percentage and MQ.

The Aim tracks even the slightest improvements, and shows those results real time on their dashboard so users can easily visualize their progress. In addition to tracking progress and setting goals, the dashboard provides tailored advice, recommending workouts that specifically target muscles that need improvement.

Started as a medical-grade device that has been used in top US hospitals, the technology underlying Skulpt was first used to measure muscle health of patients with neuromuscular disorders. The founders, Jose Bohorquez and Seward Rutkove realized that their powerful and innovative tech could be simplified into a small, effortless consumer fitness device, and the Skulpt was born. Skulpt is a 2014 International CES Innovations Award winner in the Health and Fitness product category and supporters on Aim’s Indiegogo campaign almost quadrupled their fundraising goal amount. You can pre-order the Skulpt today; launch date May 2014.

Digital Health Metrics in 2013: Mobile Usage, Doctors, and Pregnancy Apps

MobiHealthNews has compiled a list of 51 digital health metrics in 2013. For a full list, visit here.

Some interesting stats and metrics:

95M Americans used mobile for health in 2013

• “As of 2013, 95 million Americans are using mobile phones as health tools or to find health information, according to Manhattan Research. That’s 27 percent more than 2012, when the number was 75 million.”
• This number seems pretty reasonable. Research estimates that 56% of American adults have a smartphone, meaning that a little more than half of all smartphone users have searched the internet for a health related query. I’ve certainly searched for home remedies before.

Seven in ten doctors have a self-tracking patient

• “Seventy percent of doctors report that at least one patient is sharing some form of health measurement data with them, according to a survey of 2,950 practicing physicians.”
• This number seems a little high to me – but given health trackers, diabetes and weight measurement devices, and other applications (including blood pressure and cholesterol trackers), this number might not be too far off. It does suggest that patients are more aware of their health and are more open to sharing their data with others.

InMedica predicts six times as many US telehealth patients by 2017

• “According to new data released by research firm InMedica, the American telehealth market is predicted to grow by 600 percent between 2012 and 2017. While there are currently 227,000 US telehealth patients, according to InMedica, that figure is forecast to reach up to 1.3 million patients in 2017. US telehealth revenues, meanwhile, will jump from $174.5 million last year to $707.9 million in 2017.”
• While telehealth still faces some regulatory challenges, the growth trajectory shows that consumers are opening up to the idea of a slightly less personal, personal doctor’s visit.

Report finds pregnancy apps more popular than fitness apps

• “According to ByteMobile, on average, 39 percent of mobile users who are using one or more mobile health applications are using a fitness app. Of all the mobile health related data traffic that operators facilitate, about 50 percent of it comes from personal fitness apps.Ÿ While fitness apps are generating more data, it seems that pregnancy related apps are actually more popular: On average, 47 percent of total subscribers using one or more mobile health application use a pregnancy related application, according to the report. Despite the popularity of these kinds of apps they don’t generate nearly as much data as fitness ones do:Ÿ Pregnancy monitoring applications generate only 9 percent of the total mobile health related data traffic on wireless networks.”
• This stat is surprising. It says that if there are 100 mobile users who use one or more health apps, 39 of them use a fitness app and 47 of them use a pregnancy related application. Although research shows that women install 40% more apps, spend 87% more than men, men used health and fitness apps 10% more than women. Now to be fair, if you look at the breakdown of ages using mobile health apps, data shows that Millennials (aged 25-43) engaged with their smartphones every hour in the day and used fitness and health apps twice as much as the average of other age groups. This data claims that in a gender split, women use health and fitness apps 200 percent more than men do. If I were to venture a guess at the percent of total subscribers using one or more mobile health apps who use a pregnancy related app, I’d guess it’s 25% at the highest. Luckily we’ll have some interviews and posts in the next few months on pregnancy apps to find out more.

Wello: Workouts Anywhere, Anytime, with a Personal Trainer

Wello makes it easy to exercise anywhere with an internet connection. All you need is a computer with a webcam and a little space to move. My workout with pilates instructor, Kate, was great – we only had 30 minutes so she jumped right in after gauging my experience and asking me what I wanted to focus on.

Aside from a few technical difficulties – our video stream froze several times, the workout was easy to book online, the video set-up was quick to configure and Kate was prompt and motivational.

Things I really liked about Wello:

• Ability to export my scheduled workout information onto my calendar
• Ease in scheduling workouts by viewing trainers’ calendars and picking from their allotted availability
• Having one-on-one training and an expert’s attention in my living room

Personally, I like working out with a group – not just for the company but also for the price point. Wello now offers Group Workouts, which I think is a wonderful idea. Last Tuesday I signed up for a Sunday morning hardcore yoga group class. The minimum number of joiners was 3, and the class easily filled up to four participants. And then one person dropped – but that was okay because we still had three. On Sunday morning at 6AM I got an email reminding me to get ready for my workout. At 8AM I got an email saying that one more person dropped and that my 10AM workout was cancelled. For anyone who has tried to get out of a workout slump, there is nothing worse than planning to go to a group class and then having it be canceled.

To me, Wello is the at-home alternative to driving 3 miles downtown to do a yoga class, for the same price of $15. Would a yoga studio with a weekly yoga class cancel their class because only a few people showed up? No. If you pre-paid for a yoga class and didn’t show up, would you get your money back? No. So for group workouts, if the minimum number of participants is met and someone drops out 24-hours before the Wello class, I think there should be no refunds given and the class should go on. That way there is an incentive for the participant to go to a workout she paid for, the teacher gets paid the full amount for teaching a filled class AND the rest of the group doesn’t get penalized and lose their expected workout.

Overall, I think Wello is a great concept and I’m looking forward to using it more, especially during cold east coast winters when working out at home sounds much better than venturing outside to go to the gym.

Interview: Christine Lemke, AchieveMint Co-Founder, Making Healthy Choices Fun and Rewarding

AchieveMint is a multidimensional platform that not only aggregates your data from various health and lifestyle technologies (i.e. steps taken as measured by Fitbit, healthy places visited and checked in through foursquare) but additionally takes that information and uses it to reward users for healthy habits. Simply, do healthy activities tracked on mobile or web applications and earn AchieveMint points which leads to cash rewards for reaching your goals. The Company started when a few co-founders came together to discuss creating a system to track and incentivize healthy behavior as a way to improve their various health goals.

AchieveMint’s Christine Lemke, who focuses on product and operations, explains it as “There are already apps that monitor your weight and steps taken that are widely adopted. The world doesn’t need yet another one of those apps, however we saw that if there was an incentive attached to those apps, users have more loyalty in using them and ultimately improve their health.”

There has been a lot of interest from consumers who want to use AchieveMint but the company is adding users and accepting invites in a controlled and steady manner. They want to make sure that they are providing the best rewards and experience for users.

When I synced my Fitbit to the website, I was delighted to see that it pulled my historical data and gave me credit for my distance covered in early December.

The Company is offering points not only for exercise and weight loss, but also for spreading news about health. For example, soon you can earn points for tweeting and sharing healthy articles on social media websites. AchieveMint wants to work with all types of lifestyle businesses, including recipe sites and forums like Pinterest – giving points to the user for reading and promoting healthy tips.

What else can we expect going forward? Christine acknowledges that they want to make the rewards more comprehensive and not just cash based. This could mean anything from donating your earnings to a favorite charity to getting discounts on fitness gear, a nice meal or a spa day.

The Company is very focused on big data, namely sifting through all the data that is collected on you and analyzing it to get a view on which apps have what type of affect on your lifestyle. From this, AchieveMint will be able to focus on what motivates you most based on your past behavior (i.e. a certain goal or a leaderboard). Taking that knowledge, AchieveMint can create a plan for you, sort of like a “personal trainer in a box,” suggesting which activities or path to take to get back on track if you find yourself in a trough.

I certainly like the company and if you can secure a coveted invite (sign up today!) there is no reason not to use AchieveMint to help track your fitness goals and earn rewards while doing so. As Christine summarized, “At the end of the day, you improve what you can measure and we want to provide that central dashboard to aggregate your physical and social activity. We can then use that data to help people improve their quality of life through healthy living on a daily basis.”