WEARABLES - INSIDABLES - IOT - CONNECTED DEVICES - QUANTIFIEDSELF

Wearables that have weaved their way into everyday life include smart watches and wireless earphones, while in the healthcare setting, common devices include wearable injectors, electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring patches, listening aids, and more.

A major pain point facing the use of these wearables is the issue of keeping these devices properly and conveniently powered. As the number of wearables one uses increases, the need to charge multiple batteries rises in tandem, consuming huge amounts of electricity.

A research team, led by Associate Professor Jerald Yoo from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the N.1 Institute for Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has developed a technology that enables a single device, such as a mobile phone placed in the pocket, to wirelessly power other wearable devices on a user's body, using the human body as a medium for power transmission.

The team's novel system has an added advantage—it can harvest unused energy from electronics in a typical home or office environment to power the wearables.

The NUS team designed a receiver and transmitter system that uses the human body as a medium for power transmission and energy harvesting. Each receiver and transmitter contains a chip that is used as a springboard to extend coverage over the entire body.

A user just needs to place the transmitter on a single power source, such as the smart watch on a user's wrist, while multiple receivers can be placed anywhere on the person's body. The system then harnesses energy from the source to power multiple wearables on the user's body via a process termed as body-coupled power transmission. In this way, the user will only need to charge one device, and the rest of the gadgets that are worn can simultaneously be powered up from that single source. The team's experiments showed that their system allows a single power source that is fully charged to power up to 10 wearable devices on the body, for a duration of over 10 hours.

As a complementary source of power, the NUS team also looked into harvesting energy from the environment. Their research found that typical office and home environments have parasitic electromagnetic (EM) waves that people are exposed to all the time, for instance, from a running laptop. The team's novel receiver scavenges the EM waves from the ambient environment, and through a process referred to as body-coupled powering, the human body is able to harvest this energy to power the wearable devices, regardless of their locations around the body.

This paves the way for smaller, battery-free wearables

read the paper in Nature at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00592-y

read the original unedited article https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-approach-wirelessly-power-wearable-devices.html

For something as important as heart health, it’s amazing how little you probably know about yours.

Most people probably get their heart rates measured only at doctor visits. Or maybe they participate in a limited study.

But modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people!

That’s exactly what Fitbit (FIT) has done. It has now logged 150 billion hours’ worth of heart-rate data. From tens of millions of people, all over the world. The result: the biggest set of heart-rate data ever collected.

Fitbit also knows these people’s ages, sexes, locations, heights, weights, activity levels, and sleep patterns. In combination with the heart data, the result is a gold mine of revelations about human health.

Back in January, Fitbit gave me an exclusive deep dive into its 6 billion nights’ worth of sleep data. All kinds of cool takeaways resulted. So I couldn’t help asking: Would they be willing to offer me a similar tour through this mountain of heart data?

They said OK. They also made a peculiar request: Would I be willing to submit a journal of the major events of my life over the last couple of years? And would my wife Nicki be willing to do the same?

We said OK.

Although Fitbit's smart watch asset acquisitions activity has captured a lot of interest, CEO James Park made clear on a conference call with analysts that its group health and digital health business partnerships will be the biggest growth drivers for the future of the business.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a bio-degradable, edible battery powered by melanin.

Wearable technology has evolved the way people interact with their environment. Learn more about how and when wearables are going to be integrated in life.

In the evolution of computing, from the desktop computer to the smartphone to the watch, it seemed like just a matter of time before the technology would come to be swallowable — and now it is.

The innovation at the heart of it is an FDA-approved ingestible sensor housed in pills, designed to help patients adhere to the medications their doctors prescribe. Except the sensor isn't powered by a battery, it's powered by the gut of the patient swallowing it, using technology discovered two centuries ago.

"We have a small, food-particle-sized piece of silicon, an integrated circuit, and on one side of that circuit is a film of copper, on the other side a very thin film of magnesium," explained Proteus Digital Health co-founder Dr. George Savage. "When you swallow, these minerals get wet and two dissimilar metals in aqueous contact define a battery, so you become a battery." From there, the powered pill sensor sends a signal to a patch worn on the body, which sends data via Bluetooth to a phone or tablet and on to the cloud for a doctor or caregiver.

Report reveals a tectonic shift in the medical devices industry, with new technology players poised to take significant market share from traditional medical device manufacturers in the non-invasive monitoring arena.

A new wave of wearable computing devices that detect and monitor serious diseases is moving from the laboratory to the market, potentially transforming the treatment of conditions ranging from epilepsy to diabetes and creating business opportunities estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars. 

Unlike popular fitness-tracking devices, such as Fitbit Inc's Fitbit and Jawbone's UP wristbands, these so-called medical-grade wearables require approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration - a rigorous regulatory hurdle that first-generation wearables sought to avoid.

The FDA is preparing for the coming onslaught. 

Bakul Patel, FDA's associate director for digital health, told Reuters the agency is reviewing applications for three new senior health scientist positions focused on digital health.

Long criticized by some health-tech entrepreneurs as a barrier to innovation, the FDA is now seen as an important ally by companies eager to show that their devices can improve peoples' health - and eager to get heath insurers to cover them. 

"Consumers, doctors, payers all want to know if a product provides a clinical benefit," said Julie Papanek of the venture capital firm Canaan Partners, who invests in wearables startups. "Working with the FDA is the one way to get the ability to market that benefit."

A key driver in the new wearables wave is the push for so-called value-based healthcare that is part of the Affordable Care Act. The law gives doctors and hospitals financial incentives for keeping large groups of patients healthy. 

Under the old fee-for-service model, hospitals got paid when patients were hospitalized, noted Jody Ranck, a Washington, D.C.-based healthcare consultant. "Now, you can lose money," he said. Instead, healthcare providers are now eager to collect the data that can help keep people out of the hospital - especially those with chronic diseases. "These wearables are just tools to get the health data," said Ranck.

An avalanche of studies - many of them taking advantage of new data-gathering platforms such as Apple Inc's HealthKit, Google's Google Fit and Samsung's SAMI - are under way on a number of chronic diseases, especially in the area of diabetes. "We're going to see a lot of devices over the next couple of years for every chronic condition of mankind that are FDA-regulated because they all involve a treatment loop," Scripps' Topol said.

Dr. Robert Pearl of the Permanente Medical Group recently implied that wearable tech fitness trackers like the Fitbit don’t serve much purpose in medical practice. While Fitbit does have a disappointing user abandonment rate of 50%, general purpose wearables like the Apple Watch—which has sold an estimated 5-6 million units—has a tiny 6% abandonment rate. And 83% of users state that the apps like the three-rings (activity and stand-up alerts) have contributed to their overall health and fitness. Also, the Hello Heart app reported that Apple Watch users were nearly 4 times more likely to stick with the cardiovascular health management program vs other users. They discovered that 25% of users decreased their blood pressure by 22 points or more. 

Coming back to how we get wearable tech and other digital health data into the medical system, Drew Schiller, co-founder and CTO of Validic, a Durham, North Carolina-based vendor that provides access to data from digital health apps and devices (and one of my valued ecosystem partners), agreed that consumer/patient-generated digital data must be provided to a physician and care management team in a form that makes it actionable. “Patient-generated data is useful for showing health trends,” according to Schiller. So if that’s the case, it seems that as we see the wearable tech market doubling in the next four years, there will be a wealth of data available to healthcare systems with an interest in seeing patient trends and influencing their behavior, especially to prevent, manage, and even predict chronic disease. According to the CDC, chronic, behavior-based diseases account for 86% of healthcare costs.

Wearables are anything but sensible, from first hand observation they are somewhat silly, as they are trying to solve a problem that can be solved by a myriad of simpler and more passive mechanism.

If you were at CES, you could not have missed a new category of computing called "wearables." This category of devices can be described as the FitBit gone mad. Wearables currently come in three main categories: health trackers, watches and glasses. In each of these categories some if not all devices are pivoting to solving the world's biggest health problems.

Almost daily, I see a new wearable device launched, and while they all are minimally viable products, they continually get sillier and sillier. We are seeing everything from wearable necklaces (like necklaces were never wearable) earrings, shoes, clothing and many other bodily accruements being outfitted with small computers/biosensors, low voltage needs and high connectivity. Like clockwork, every new device no matter how silly, calls out to the world with press releases, tweets, YouTube videos and multiple pounds of the manufacturing firm's proverbial digital chest reckoning how disruptive some new wearable product is.

My observation is that we have bastardized the word disruption. Most wearables are disturbing mankind under the once well-intended charter of disruption.

While a minority of humans continue to wear these devices past the first few months of purchase, most folks (like myself) stop wearing after the nostalgia has worn off. I gave up my FitBit after about six months, my pebble watch in about six days and my Google GLASS, well I got over that bad boy in about six hours. I got over them the same way I got over my first CASIO watch, which doubled as a calculator in high school; said watch plus calculator was disturbing my life. Disruption does not have to disturb.

Good disruption is change without disturbance.

The hypothesis is simple, wearing something on my body that is not confortable, fashionable and delivering more value than it disturbs me is not a sustainable value proposition. So the big question is what will become of wearables? Clearly the movement of computing to the edge of the network will continue, and the connecting of things/biosensors that are not computers (Internet of Things) will continue. Wearables currently position themselves as trying to solve health's biggest problems. [..]

Read the full article!

Everyone loves the idea of strapping a smartwatch to their wrist and using it to get a bit healthier, but there's a fine line between casual wearables and serious medical devices. It's an important distinction, since while the former can be sold without any sort of oversight, the latter is rightly covered by the FDA's regulations. Since the most recent batch of fitness wearables could be blurring the borders somewhat, the agency has decided to make its thinking on the subject a little clearer.

The agency has published a draft guidance note that, as yet, isn't legally binding and requests opinions from the public. As far as it's concerned, "general wellness devices," i.e. watches that vaguely encourage people to get fitter, aren't any sort of risk to the public. This means that your Fitbit is okay to tell you to go for a walk, your Aura can coach your sleeping and Lumosity can pretend to make you smarter without any worries. Mostly the FDA is concerned with risk, and there isn't much risk if your smartphone tells you to lay off the burgers one every now and again.

more at http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/20/fda-wearables-guidance-note/

While wearables primarily are buckled to consumers' wrists at this point, they'll soon find a new home: the ear, says Craig Stires, associate vice president for big data, software and analytics at IDC Asia Pacific. And they might even get a new moniker: hearables.

Les wearables s'imposent petit à petit sur le marché des objets à destination des personnes handicapées. Après la chaussure connectée ou encore l'imprimante 3D qui «&nbspsculpte » les photos, voilà le bracelet qui permet aux aveugles de mieux appréhender leur environnement. L'Ustraap, imaginé par la start-up mexicaine éponyme, est capable de détecter les obstacles mais aussi de déterminer leur taille, leur nombre, leur densité et leur mobilité, pour offrir aux personnes aveugles ou mal-voyantes une expérience sensorielle à 360 degrés. Equipé de plusieurs capteurs, le bracelet «&nbspcommunique » avec son utilisateur à l'aide de vibrations.Passée par l'accélérateur de Boston MassChallenge, la jeune pousse a reçu le mois dernier 50 000 dollars de financement pour pouvoir commercialiser son bracelet. L'Ustraap est actuellement ouvert aux précommandes et devrait être disponible en avril prochain pour 349 dollars. Crédit Photo : Ustraap

Late last month, TechnologyAdvice released an interesting study looking at whether most people want to use health wearables such as fitness trackers and other tools for health purposes.

Here are the top-line results of this study:

- 75 percent of U.S. adults do not track their weight, diet, or exercise using a health tracking apps or devices

- 43.7 percent had no specific reason for not tracking their fitness 

- 27.2 percent won’t use these devices due to lack of interest

- 25.1 percent of adults are currently using either a fitness tracker or a smartphone app to monitor their health, weight, or exercise.

This sounds like pretty bad news for those who believe the era of health wearables is here. But, this study also raises another question: Are health wearables evangelists fools?

Fard Johnmar, Founder of Enspektos explains why relevancy is the key to boosting the adoption of health wearables.  

Read more at http://hitconsultant.net/2014/10/08/are-health-wearables-evangelists-fools/

Wearables, devices used to sense data and process it into information, are generating quite the buzz in healthcare these days. But down the line, does that buzz come with a sting?

As the number of self-tracking health and fitness tools available to consumers continues to climb, a persistent question has been whether the data they collect might be useful to health researchers. Along with that: Are people who self-track comfortable sharing their data with researchers?

A new, must-read report from San Diego’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, explores these and other questions.

Based on a survey with hundreds of self-trackers, a majority — 57 percent — said one critical assurance they would need before agreeing to make their self-tracked, personal health data available to researchers was that their privacy would be protected. More than 90 percent also said it was important that their data remained anonymous. Respondents said they’d be more comfortable sharing data if they knew it was only going to be used for “public good” research.

One open-ended survey that the report’s researchers posed to self-trackers found that 13 percent of respondents specifically mentioned an aversion to commercial or profit-making use of their data, according to the report. One respondent wrote: “It depends who gets it. Research using these data will be instrumental in the future of personal predictive services, but also for that reason are likely to be exploited by marketers and the politically short-sighted. Thus I would like transparency for who has access to my data.”

A newly published Apple patent application that details ways to improve a wrist-based pedometer could represent another piece of evidence pointing to an iWatch.

The application, “Wrist Pedometer Step Detection,” came out of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today. This is part of the standard patent process toward issuance. It details ways to improve step detection when someone is wearing a pedometer on a wrist.

In the patent application’s implementation, the pedometer might be able to “automatically determine that the pedometer is being worn on a user’s wrist.”

Pedometers, the application points out, are often attached to a user’s trunk – on the waist or pants or shirt pocket. A commonly used algorithm to measures steps, however, doesn’t work as well when the pedometer is on a wrist, because the arm’s movement can interfere with the measurement of acceleration.

Women facing imminent danger when walking down the street or getting into their cars will soon have new safety options in the booming wearables space.

Sense6, a five-member startup based in San Francisco, is unveiling jewelry pieces that sync to a user’s cellphone to alert authorities when the wearer encounters danger.

The device, which syncs via Bluetooth, simultaneously sends geolocation alerts to the phones of family members and loved ones at the touch of a button. Sense6′s smart jewelry also contains voice recorders that activate automatically and send the data in real time to the cloud.

more at http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/16/smart-jewelry-could-save-womens-lives/

No one has arms long enough to wear all of the activity-tracking wristbands currently on sale or awaiting release. These devices count your steps, measure your sleep and some even monitor your heart rate.

But do you know how this information immediately applies to your lifestyle, or what you should do with it?

The services behind these trackers need to invest in immediacy by providing useful information, ideally in real time, so we can optimize our wealth of data into action.

Everyone wants to be better, but nobody has a baseline for understanding themselves.

what use is the data without knowing in real time what you, individually, can do to change it?

I’d like to know whether I need to slow down. Am I pushing myself too hard?

The consumer electronics industry is expanding beyond its traditional borders as consumers start to adopt technologies that make use of ubiquitous computing power, sensors, and wearable product designs.

Shawn Dubravac, chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association, made this observation of the industry at the first press event at the 2014 International CES, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.

Among the trends he sees taking hold are mass customization, thanks to technologies like 3D printing. The 3D printing companies like Maker Bot have their own space at the show now, 7,000 square feet of exhibits, and it’s sold out. He believes about 99,000 3D printers will ship in 2014.

Consumers are also embracing lots of new screens in their lives. As an example, tablets didn’t exist as a big market in 2009. But now, in the U.S., Dubravac said that tablet ownership is expected to exceed 50 percent of households once the numbers from the holiday season are tallied up.

He also said that wearables and the spread of mobile devices are making more new technologies possible. And many of these new devices are autonomous, or able to do smart things on their via robotics or artificial intelligence.

Dubravac said that mobile devices are expected to outnumber computing devices sold to date sometime in 2014 or 2015.