Today’s wearables fall short of the goal of delivering medical-grade information in ways useful to consumers, said the co-founder of a startup about to launch its first product.
“Wearables today still provide limited information and limited accuracy,” said Julien Penders, chief operating officer of Bloom Technologies (San Francisco). For example, activity
trackers showed “a factor of eight difference between two devices” in one recent review,
he said in a talk at the Embedded Systems Conference here.
As a researcher at the Imec institute outside Brussels, Penders helped develop technology behind the Samsung Simband which includes 13 sensors. A variety of sensors are needed
to deliver medical-grade information because every sensor has trade-offs, Penders said.
For example, optical photoplethysmogram sensors used on some smart watches are highly accurate but “batteries won’t last more than a day and they only work well under rest or
moderate motion and have poor performance when moving because blood flushes creating artifacts,” he said.
By contrast, “bio-impedance sensors use as much as two orders of magnitude less power but generate more artifacts and thus less reliability,” he said. And popular activity trackers do not generally
deliver accurate information about calories burned.
“As a consequence wearables fail to engage people,” said Penders. “They stop using devices in a couple months because they give you information you already know -- I know how active I am,” he said.
Wearables can solve real consumer problems and advance medical research, Pedners said
.
The way forward, according to penders, is “to address real problems…and put accurate information, medical-grade information in consumers’ hands,” he said.
That implies simplifying a continuous flow of medical data down to a few relevant
recommended actions. “We need to summarize big data into small data,” Penders said. But he was quick to advise attendees to “embrace regulation to get a medical-grade stamp” for products.
Work on printed and stretchable circuits, some as thin as 25 microns, are helping create
wearables consumers can wear more comfortably in various places. “We have to move
beyond today’s race to the wrist,” he added, predicting today’s smart watches will be
followed by devices such as smart contact lenses and eventually implants.
Penders is taking his own prescription. At Bloom Technologies he is developing a smart
patch to track the health of a pregnant women and her fetus. He just completed a beta test
and hopes to launch the product later this year.
Attendees questioned Penders about the details Bloom patch and the company’s plan for
marketing it. But he declined to provide details until the formal launch.
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