LEO: A Smart Wearable With A Data Driven Recommendation Engine

Within several days, GestureLogic reached its Indiegogo funding goal on their first device, LEO. LEO isn’t just another wearable device that counts your steps or tracks motions. LEO measures biosignals (such as muscle activity and lactic acid levels) to calculate exertion – giving users recommendations on how to workout more efficiently and telling athletes when they are pushing too hard. Knowing when to stop or tone down the intensity helps avoid potential injuries. LEO’s feedback loop makes it an invaluable fitness tool. As the wearer changes intensity and speed, so does the real-time feedback from LEO – urging the user to push harder or continue to taper. LEO tracks your physical starting point, noting each specific user’s unique physiology, and sets goals based on these metrics. While it may be obvious that two different bodies with two different weights and peak heart rates should have two different workout plans even if the end goal (say losing 10 lbs) is the same – not many wearables are able to tailor workout routines like LEO can.

LEO’s key capabilities include:

• Tracking muscle activity, hydration, lactic acid levels, heart rate, and movement
• Providing education and advice throughout a user’s workout with simple and actionable recommendations
• Identifying signs of future injury and recommending ways to avoid it
• Improve training with intuitive visualizations with the raw data available
• Competing with friends, comparing workouts with pro athletes and networking with the local fitness community

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.

Best in Healthcare For 2013

2013 was a great year for consumer healthcare technology. This year, 95 million Americans have used mobile phones as health tools or as search devices to find healthcare information, paving the way for a more connected and health conscious 2014.

To continue with my annual Year in Review, I present some of my favorite companies and posts in 2013.

A big thank you to my readers for your support, ideas and input.

-Alexis

Best New Entrants into Wearables:

• Misfit Wearables — Self-tracking wearable, incredibly elegant and striking
• Withings Pulse — Self-tracking wearable, Withings’ first entry into the physical activity tracker space
• Goji Play — Self-tracking indoor cardio wearable, transforms any cardio machine into an interactive gaming workout
• OnTheGo Platforms — Smart glass app development platform that focuses on exercise apps and more
• Updated versions of the Jawbone UP, Fitbit Force and Nike+ FuelBand SE

Best Smart Fabric Concepts:

• Athos — Athletic apparel made with smart fabric and sensors to measure every muscle exertion, heartbeat, and breath
• OMsignal  — Embedded sensors in the apparel monitor your heart rate, breathing, and activity

 Best Fitness Apps:

• RunKeeper — GPS app to track outdoor fitness activities
• Moves — GPS app to track daily activity continuously, shown on a timeline
• Charity Miles — GPS app that tracks and lets you earn money for charity when you walk, run, or bike

 Best Personalized Coaching:

• Sessions — Simple, individual, and thoughtful fitness program to help you get healthy
• Wello — Online workouts with a Certified Personal Trainer in real-time on your mobile device over live video

A New Twist to Common Items:

• HAPIfork — An electronic fork that monitors eating habits and alerts you when you eat too fast
• Beam Technologies — A smart toothbrush that monitors oral hygiene and reports habits to a smart app
• Withings Blood Pressure Monitor — Measures, calculates and tracks changes in blood pressure on graphs

Best Up and Coming:

• PUSH — Tracks and analyzes performance at the gym; measures power, force and balance
• Emotiv Insight — Multi-channel, wireless headset that monitors brain activity to optimize brain fitness and measures cognitive health and well-being
• Scanadu Scout — Medical tricorder to measure, analyze and track vitals
• MC10 — Stretchable electronics that conform to the shape of the body to measure and track vitals

Best for Healthcare Providers:

• Pristine — Develops Glass apps to help hospitals deliver safer, more coordinated, more cost effective care
• Informedika — Marketplace for electronic test ordering and results exchange between healthcare providers
• IntelligentM — Data-driven hand hygiene compliance solutions for hospitals to dramatically reduce healthcare-acquired infections

Athos: Smart Fabric Measures Every Breath, Heartbeat and Muscle Exertion

A smart fabric plus an accelerometer core creates the next level in quantified performance clothing. I spoke with Athos founding team members, Dhananja Jayalath, Chris Wiebe, and Joel Seligstein to learn more about the technology behind Athos.

What’s so special about Athos fabric?

DJ: “The cloth has sensors that are built directly into the fabric. With ECG sensors and muscle output sensors integrated into the clothing, you can very accurately measure heart rate and muscle effort. The Core is the analytics module of the sensors – it’s essentially the computer that collects and analyzes all the stats and sends the data to the mobile app.”

Why did you opt for clothing instead of a wrist / arm wearable?

DJ: “We wanted to capture data from multiple points. We wanted to capture info from your biceps, quads and triceps, which our fabric lets us do. By building the sensors into clothing we think it also makes it easy to use and remember, and helps create a routine.” Since all the sensors are built in, you’ll be able to measure heart rate without a chest strap and get real-time responsive input on how to best train for your goals.

“We believe that apparel is going to get smarter, it’s not just something you cover yourself up with anymore. Athletes will get an advantage in training with Athos unlike what a simple wicking shirt or compression shorts provide.”

Who is your target audience?

Chris: “People who are going on 6am rides or heading to the gym 3-5 times a week with the goal of getting better and stronger – that is our target market.” Athos apparel is focused on people who want to get better at their fitness goals and those who want to analyze their performance and continue to do better. The company’s differentiation factor is that they aren’t trying to motivate stationary people to move more – they want to help athletes be more efficient and train harder. Athos would be an ideal partner for sports teams, events like the Olympics, gyms, and trainers.

“We’ve talked internally about how our data is good enough for pros to use so that they can train for their events but still approachable enough for the average consumer to use.”

How is the app user experience?

Joel: “We are using the app to give tailored insight to what your body is doing. For weightlifters counting reps is important, but if you are riding a bike, cadence and balance and pushing vs. pulling on the pedal is important. Long term, we’ll continue to iterate and make things customized.“

What is the key takeaway here?

DJ: “We are not just about collecting data – we are about giving the user a great experience. We are not just about the hardware – we want to deliver performance and comfort in something that is unique and useful.”
 

PUSH: Quantify Your Strength, Track Your Power

People like to exaggerate. “I benched 350 yesterday,” says your office brah’. Now you can tell him to prove it.

PUSH is a new wearable device – an armband + a mobile app – that tracks and analyzes your performance at the gym. Specifically targeting strength workouts, PUSH tracks metrics including force, power, balance and consistency of your training and pushes you to train harder or ease up based on your performance. You can use PUSH to track squats, dead lifts, pull ups, bench presses and more – just about your entire CrossFit workout can be monitored. The device straps onto your arm and lets you review your progress on the app in real time. In addition to sharing your results with friends and competing with them, PUSH can create personalized workout routines to best improve your training without overdoing it, preventing injuries.

You can check out their Indiegogo campaign and get your PUSH, schedule for April/May 2014 delivery.

Kishan Shah: 200 Pounds Lost, the President of Downsize Fitness Continues to Inspire

I met Kishan Shah in 2007, when we both interned on the trading floor at UBS Investment Bank. While he might describe himself as heavy set back then, I remember his inquisitive personality and warm smile. In truth, he was halfway through his weight loss journey, which started in 2005 when he hit 400 pounds. In 2007 he was down to 250 pounds. Kishan hit 230 pounds when he was leaving Dubai, where he had worked at consulting firm, Oliver Wyman, after spending time at a mixed martial arts training camp in Thailand for a month (he dreamed of training like Rocky when he was a kid). Although Kishan hit a small roadblock, gaining 40 pounds while working at an investment bank in Chicago, he moved to New York to work at Goldman Sachs and got down to 195 pounds a year and a half ago using their onsite gym. He’s been at 195 pounds ever since.

Kishan surprised me this past spring with a call to discuss healthcare technology and fitness. Although he had worked in finance his entire career, he wanted to focus more on his passion – bringing his personal experience of losing over 200 pounds through diet and exercise to others. Kishan soon after joined Downsize Fitness as President and has been a public health advocate ever since, even speaking with First Lady Michelle Obama about his experience.

I asked Kishan to share some of his experiences and expertise with us:

When did you first realize there was something wrong with your weight, and when did you start to do something about it?

Taken from my article on Greatist:  In 2005, I hit my turning point. It wasn’t the impending amputation of my right foot from diabetic complications that provoked me to change my health routines — it was the embarrassment of shopping for a suit. I was at a store for large men when the tailor’s five-foot tape measure could not fit around my 62-inch waist. I saw the pity in his eyes, the tears in mine, and I promptly exited the store, determined to turn things around.

Many people yo-yo diet when they are trying to lose weight, how did you keep yourself motivated at first, and how do you continue to motivate yourself?

I spent my first 19 years yo-yo dieting and was generally unsure of how the human body worked.  I believe changing one’s own environment is the single most important factor towards successful, sustainable weight loss.  That’s why at Downsize, our secret sauce is community.  We make sure to provide all of the tools for people to live happy, healthier lives – whether that means fitness training, nutritional advice, support groups, events with affiliates and partners, a kickball league, you-name-it.  We don’t advocate supplements/magic-pills/or any sort of quick fixes.

Today, it’s less about my own weight and more about helping others.  I personally receive at least 10 emails a week about how my story has inspired others.  It’s the greatest feeling in the world.

Do you use any health apps or devices?

I have used a Nike FuelBand in the past.  We use a quantified-self device called MYZONE to track our members’ heart rates and calorie burn in real-time at our gyms.  We also use an Inbody Scale to provide a detailed body composition analysis to our members at Downsize.

While I love these devices and enjoy using them, I personally weigh myself once a quarter – I judge my progress based upon how I feel and how my clothes fit.  As a former Wall-Streeter, I am intensely analytical and appreciate data.  However, I have come to the realization that my fitness and nutrition program’s ultimate output is to make me happier and healthier.  I try not to be bogged down in the numbers and instead focus on a deeper level of awareness to understand what my body and mind are actually telling me.

You have extensive experience working at some of the world’s most well-known financial institutions. What made you make the switch to be President at Downsize Fitness?

Downsize provided me with an opportunity to do the following:

1. Focus on a population segment that I care deeply about.  From my personal experience, being overweight, I felt society ridiculed and ostracized me.  The traditional fitness industry has ignored this population and the medical community has provided minimal support.
2. Create human-level impact.  Our members love coming to Downsize, no company has made sustainable weight loss fun – it’s a drill sergeant bringing you to tears in the gym or a juice cleanse which makes you starve.  We’ve had members kick their insulin injection.  We’re literally saving lives and making people happier on a daily basis.
3. Be an operator.  Growing an organization and mentoring talent excite me.  I absolutely love what I do – I see a relationship between my effort and the number of lives I can touch.  There’s nothing more impactful than that.

What are your passions?

Other than Downsize:

1. Teaching.  I want to help others in an educational setting – whether that means entrepreneurship, business lessons, or general career advice.  I’ve taught at Columbia and my alma mater University of Michigan and have designed my own course at General Assembly – I hope to teach at more schools and through different online platforms in 2014.
2. Hip hop music.  It represents the hustle and ability to connect with people from all walks of life.  Check out my interview with The Phat Startup bridging hip hop and business.

In a perfect world, from a health perspective, what would you like to see?

The AMA finally recognized obesity as a disease which is a great first step to engage the medical community.  At Downsize, we hired our Chief Medical Advisor who has helped his patients lose 80,000 pounds.  We are working closely with providers to generate happier and healthier communities.

What tips or recommendations would you give readers who are in the process of losing weight?

1. Execute.  Even on my weekends, I wake up at 6AM and I am in the gym by 7AM.  It’s extremely satisfying to have woken up, get in a great workout, eat breakfast, catch up with friends over Skype in Europe and the Middle East all before noon.  It may sound like a chore to do this, but your body adapts to being more active.
2. Read.  While I may have lost a few pounds, I am continually learning about healthy foods, new exercises and additional spiritual techniques to de-stress and focus.  I love the concept of growing stronger and smarter every day.
3. Listen.  Play therapist and listen to your family, friends and peers about their views on food habits and exercise routines.  I love hearing different perspectives and constantly tinker with my own personal (and Downsize’s) approach to keep things interesting.
4. Rest.   I hope that everyone takes time to rest during the weekend.  As an introvert, I look forward to that special time each week that I can spend alone, away from our increasingly connected world to simply unwind.  It recharges my emotional batteries, rests my muscles from my workouts, clears my mind and restores my ambition for the coming week.

Yoga Studio: Personalized Yoga Classes at Home or On The Go

For less than a small latte in San Francisco, the Yoga Studio app has a collection of 15 – 60 minute mobile and tablet optimized instructional yoga classes of varying degrees of difficulty. You can also create your own classes by selecting poses from their extensive pose library (over 1,700 yoga video clips) and stitching them together. Downloaded videos are small and don’t take up much space, and you can also play yoga classes on your TV using AppleTV AirPlay mirroring. Best of all, the app has a built in reminder system for busy people, with a scheduling function that syncs to your calendar.

This app is a great supplement to a once a week or twice a month in-person yoga classes and a great way to do guided yoga while at home, traveling or outdoors. The pose library, with over 280 poses, makes it easy to review things learned in class, at home.

When you begin your yoga session, a calm, gentle voice guides you to breathe and move into your first pose. The directions are perfectly synced to the poses, just like in a class and the app’s Smart-link feature naturally connects poses I’ve picked in my “Post-Run Yoga” session that might not naturally lead into each other.

With a busy travel season ahead of me, I will definitely be using Yoga Studio to complement my marathon training and general wellness.

Instabeat: A Body Monitor for Swimmers

Instabeat is a body monitor specifically made for swimmers. The device clips onto your swimming goggles (fits all goggle frames) and has an optical sensor that can read your heart rate. Additionally, the device measures number of laps, flip turns and breathing levels during swimming. Lights on the wearable project colors onto your lenses in real-time to notify how close you are to reaching preset fat burning, fitness and performance goals. Instabeat then syncs with your personal dashboard which tracks your swimming results and progress over time. Runners and cyclists have had wearable devices for a while now and finally swimmers will too!

Jawbone UP: Finally, One Fitness Platform to Sync Them All

After learning about and testing various wearable devices (including the Nike FuelBand, the Fitbit One, the Basis, etc.) I settled on the Jawbone UP band for myself.

Today, Jawbone announced that it will acquire BodyMedia (which had a large presence at CES this year), as well as open the UP platform so that developers can create apps and tools to integrate with the current Jawbone software. The approximate $100 million acquisition of BodyMedia will give Jawbone access to their wireless wearables and VUE Patch technology, further cementing Jawbone’s place in the health and wellness space. The UP platform opened today with ten partners, including Withings and RunKeeper. The open API will soon follow. This new integration will sync your data from various applications onto the UP platform where everything (your weight, blood pressure, running distance, etc.) can be viewed in one place. I’m very pleased with this type of application management system and I know that I made the right choice in using Jawbone as my main health tracker.

Reebok Fitness: Create Your Own Workout Program

Reebok Fitness is a fitness app that lets you create your own 6 to 12 week workout program. The app sends you reminders for your workouts as well as instructions on new moves and tips / tutorials from fitness professionals. I especially like that you can sync workout details to your phone’s calendar. The app and the exclusive Reebok trainer tips and videos are free to the public and provides a good platform for starting a workout routine.