Your Personal Trainer (and Doctor) Is a Gadget

  Your Personal Trainer (and Doctor) Is a Gadget

 

Health-related gadgets have long been a quirky mainstay of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), with exhibitors hocking high-tech pedometers, treadmills that serve as makeshift (albeit awkward) game controllers, and more. The sideshow acts are still in attendance at CES 2013: See the irresistibly silly HAPIfork, a $99 Bluetooth-connected fork that detects when it touches your mouth and shames you with a lip-buzzing vibration if you eat too fast. But this year, a combination of cheap sensors, ubiquitous smartphones, and cloud computing’s expanding reach has transformed the category from a collective novelty act into a legitimate market segment.

The debuts that deserve the spotlight are more sophisticated devices, such as a lineup of nearly identical health trackers from a handful of different companies. These include the Fitbit Flex, a $100 wrist-worn product that collects activity, sleep, and pedometer-related data (such as distance traveled) from the wearer. Bodymedia’s Core 2 (no price announced, though its predecessor, currently featured on The Biggest Loser, runs for $99) senses motion, skin temperature, and galvanic skin response, but it’s a more obtrusive approach, strapped to the user’s upper arm. Both devices send data to your smartphone via Bluetooth; your phone funnels that steady stream of numbers to the companies’ servers for crunching. For the best results, you have to tell the corresponding app what you’re eating. But the reward for that caloric self-reporting is a surprising amount of analysis and feedback.

The Flex will determine whether you’re hitting your various weight and activity goals. The Bodymedia’s Core 2 is proactive. If the armband detects a particularly sedentary day, the app might suggest a 15 minute jog before dinner. Enter your planned dinner, and it might stretch or compress that recommended jog based on what you’re going to eat. And if the armband detects a stretch of sleepless nights (as evidenced by an armband that’s moving too much, or specific fluctuations in skin temperature that show you’re laying in bed but wide awake), it might advise an earlier dinner or a change in your exercise schedule.

CES 2013 features numerous variations on this theme. The $50 Fitbug Orb, for one, can not only be worn in a wristband or pocket, but also can be encased in a rubber holder and slipped into a bra or underwear. The common thread for all the programs, though, is the unprecedented degree of personal data collection.

It seems that the question is becoming, just how much do you want to know about yourself? Plant surveillance devices on yourself and hand over the resulting data to fitness apps, and your health might improve. But this new wave of devices paints an unflattering picture of human nature—we are, at heart, lazy. Yes, we already knew that, but being prodded about our laziness by our phone is somehow different from reading just another article about how we ought to spend less of our days sitting down. And from the Core 2’s exercise-gauging accelerometers to the Smart Body Analyzer scale by Withing, which automatically reads your heart rate when you step on it, connected health trackers have more ways to collect data without prompting the user. "We think the explosion of such health sensors has to do with their simplicity and their capacity to fit into someone’s life without asking more questions," says Cedric Hutchinson, CEO of Withing.

Self-sufficiency is a major part of these gadgets’ appeal. Aside from the occasional plea for a recharge (which happens less often than in previous devices, due to the widespread use of the newer, lower-power Bluetooth Smart protocol), these gadgets need minimal baby-sitting or attention to effectively siphon your data. If anything, it’s their job to nag you, hectoring the user with a variety of graphs, suggestions, and alerts. Finding the right balance between insistent mothering and constant, grating push notifications is part of the challenge facing this segment’s product designers.

For those who worry about privacy and security, connected health-tracking raises difficult questions such as what the companies might eventually do with the data they’re so deftly tabulating and grinding, or what happens when someone inevitably hacks into or intercepts the data flowing from those back-end servers. The Core 2 can allow a doctor to check up on the data collected from you—a potential boon to individualized health care or a privacy nightmare, depending upon your point of view. But for the well-meaning customer, the one who plans to change his or her state of health for the better, that’s a concern for another, fitter time.

Source : popularmechanics.com