Health & Fitness

The PIP: A Biosensor that Helps You Relax Through Play

2013-06-18

Here’s a little bit of wireless fun that QTOOTH spotted on Kickstarter. Nothing like some play that’s designed to channel our stress into more healthy channels. Check it out:

The PIP wireless biosensor, combined with a suite of apps, allows you to master the art of relaxation through gaming.

What if you could not only measure your stress but learn to control it?

The PIP is a revolutionary biosensor that helps you really learn to relax, improve your performance in any aspect of your life and combat stress. Available for both iOS and Android, the PIP detects whether you are stressing or relaxing in real time.

We’ve made the PIP super-easy to use. Just hold it between your fingertips and it will communicate your stress level wirelessly to a game or app running on your smartphone or tablet. An ever-expanding suite of gaming and entertainment apps will be available, allowing you to visualize your relaxation and master your stress in a fun and engaging way.

In today’s fast-paced world, the PIP is designed to suit your lifestyle – highly portable, easy to use and above all, fun. The PIP is a unique product that empowers you to beat stress, when and where you want to.

How does it work?

When you are in a stressful situation your body’s flight or fight response is activated. As a result, blood is rushed to the periphery of the body which causes your sweat glands to activate. This activation changes the conductivity of your skin and is referred to as the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR).

Held between your finger and thumb, the PIP captures those changes and transmits them, via Bluetooth, to your mobile device.

Algorithm for Deducing Stress

Merely measuring the GSR is not enough. We have developed our own complex GSR analysis systems to give accurate feedback for all users of the PIP regardless of skin type and environmental conditions.

Biofeedback

The PIP has emerged from research and development in the exciting “Quantified Self” space, and empowers the user to develop relaxation skills using a technique called biofeedback. One of the most valuable aids in any learning process is performance feedback. Biofeedback is a process where the user learns to gain conscious control over an aspect of their psycho-physiological state, by providing continuous information on whether or not they are “doing the right thing”. With repeated practice, the user gradually evolves a personal strategy that produces the desired result. This offers all sorts of opportunities for people to “manage the moment” – from general well-being, to any area of life where being calm improves performance.

The PIP and Games

Any activity that requires repetition is in danger of becoming boring. That’s why the PIP puts the fun into relaxation. The feedback mechanism is provided through a game running on a smartphone or tablet. Users’ stress levels, as measured by the PIP, are used to determine their performance in the game: the more relaxed they are, the better they do. The counter-intuitive way the PIP works is a powerful learning mechanism. One of the great strengths of video games is that they allow the player to have fun, while performing the same task over and over again. By using games as the context for biofeedback, the user learns how to relax quickly, while having fun at the same time.

Compatibility

The PIP will work with the iPhone 4S and above, the iPad 3 and above and most Android smart devices.

Limited Edition PIPs

For Kickstarter we’re offering a special choice of colors. We’ve included the image below for illustrative purposes to give people an idea of what these PIPs will look like.

Our Games

Relax & Race

Relax & Race is the racing game where victory is achieved only by “out-relaxing” your opponent. Competitive games normally predispose the player to a state of increased tension, but in Relax & Race, you must discover how to override this tendency, and learn not only to relax, but to relax in a stressful environment.

The game takes the form of a race between two characters. Your stress level is used to determine your speed in the race: the more you relax, the faster you go. The winner is the player who manages to relax the most during the course of the game.

Relax & Race provides a fun and constructive way of learning how to manage stress – a valuable skill in today’s increasingly hectic world.

The Loom

Use your powers of relaxation to turn winter into summer. As you relax, the landscape responds to reflect your inner calmness – snow and ice thaw, leaves begin to shoot and flowers bloom. The music adapts too – starting out as a single instrument, hidden layers are revealed as your stress melts away.

Relax long enough and the scene is bathed in glorious summer sunshine accompanied by a rich orchestral score. In the Loom, soothing imagery and music combine to dissolve tension, leaving you calm, relaxed and ready to tackle whatever lies ahead.

Lie Detective

How will your friends and family react to a grilling from the Lie Detective? Less-than-truthful answers to probing questions manifest as increased stress levels. Lie detective displays this response through a classic film noir look. This application provides incredible entertainment and an extra layer of fun for your social events. Let the interrogation begin!

The Plan

A successful Kickstarter campaign will help us finalise our manufacturing arrangements, get our apps ready for release and deliver the PIP to your doorstep. With the support of the Kickstarter Community, we can make stress history!

PIP Components & Assembly

So far, we have designed and manufactured a limited number of prototype PIPs which we have used to develop, test and demonstrate our games. We have recently completed a hardware revision to update our bluetooth technology and accommodate a smaller micro USB connector for charging. We finally have all the pieces in-place to move to full scale manufacturing. We have engaged a world leading manufacturing partner capable of meeting our Kickstarter demand and far beyond.

via The PIP: A Biosensor that Helps You Relax Through Play. by Galvanic — Kickstarter.

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Wireless ‘Under the Skin’ Sensor Implant Beams Instant Blood Test Results to Your Smartphone

2013-06-05

A new blood-testing sub-dermal sensor has been developed by a team of scientists in Switzerland. While that may not sound particularly notable, this half-inch prototype can instantly beam several health metrics to smart devices over Bluetooth, monitoring cholesterol, blood sugar levels as well as the impact of medical treatments like chemotherapy using five built-in sensors.

The device has already been tested on animals and while the researchers hope to begin testing soon on patients that would typically require a lot of blood tests and monitoring, the module is still several years from a commercial release. According to the EPFL’s video, the under the skin sensor can even predict heart attacks several hours before they occur, sensing minute changes in the bloodstream ahead of time.

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Body Monitors Help Drive Healthy Behavior Change

2013-06-01

Body tracking systems are demonstrating their value in successful interventions for weight management and other potential health applications, according to many studies being presented at the American University of Sports Medicine’s 60th Yearly Meeting and Fourth World Congress on Exercise and Medicine, opening today in Indianapolis. The studies, using the BodyMedia armband body monitoring system. recommend that technology can be utilized to help urge healthy and balanced habits and achieve successful health outcomes while also reducing the necessity for in-person consultations for therapy support.

One study, Effect of a Lifestyle Intervention Prior to Bariatric Surgery on Objectively Measured Physical Activity in Severely Obese Adults, demonstrated a six-month weight-loss amongst people in the intervention team participating in enhanced light and moderate-to-vigorous strength exercising verses those in common treatment. The research featured a pre-surgery diet plan and exercising program accompanied by a mix of in-person sessions, phone consults and using physical body monitors to gauge the changes in levels of activity.

In another study, The Comparison of a Technology-based System and In-person Behavioral Weight Loss Intervention in the Severely Obese, researchers looked at methods of weight-loss interventions that can be provided either by face-to-face meetings or through tech-based procedures, including Bluetooth-enabled activity monitors. The research team enlisted Class II and Class III obese people, and found that a three-month program utilizing the BodyMedia armbands and its web-based system to track dietary consumption and physical body weight, both with or without using a smartphone, in addition to one 10-minute intervention phone conversation each month resulted in weight loss similar to typical in-person behavioral interventions. The findings suggest that considerable short-term weight-loss in the significantly obese can be attained with less in-person interaction than today’s traditional support programs.

BodyMedia spearheaded the development of wearable body monitors that gather physical information for use in enhancing fitness, health and wellness. The data captured by BodyMedia’s tools is used by customers as well as health and wellness experts to lead behavior modifications to aid in regulating weight and promote an energetic lifestyle, two aspects that are consistently mentioned as tricks to combat and manage severe health care problems. The BodyMedia innovation has been made use of in hundreds of medical research studies covering health and wellness issues such as weight problems, diabetes, COPD, cancer, cystic fibrosis, bariatrics, intensive care, and sleep.

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Review: Fitbit Flex Activity Monitor

2013-05-21

In well-defined markets, it’s rare to see a breakthrough device. And yet here we are. There are a lot of sleep and activity trackers to choose from right now, but none better than the Fitbit Flex. It is the most wearable, best-syncing device in the scrum, with the best app to boot. And it does all this at a great price.

The Flex is very similar to the Fitbit One, but smaller and housed and without a display. And instead of wearing it on your belt, bra or pocket, you slide it in and out of a slim, rubberized wristband. The band is extremely basic, and it lacks the design elements of the Jawbone Up or the display of the Nike+ FuelBand. Other than the LED lights it uses to give you feedback, it is visually flat. In short, it’s not obviously some sort of sensor.

What it is, however, is highly wearable. A fitted clasp keeps it locked on your wrist securely. Most of the time, at least — I managed to dislodge it once while getting my squirming two year old out of a car seat. But I found it stayed on better than the Up. Similarly, there are no parts to lose, unlike the Up’s end cap that has a tendency to pop off and disappear over time. It’s waterproof-ish — while you can’t take it diving, you can wear it in the shower. In a huge improvement over the One, you don’t have to put it in an armband (it’s already in one) at night to track your sleep. That lack of visual flair also means it doesn’t look out of place with a suit, or a track suit. It comes in black. You can buy a three-pack of other colors if you want for an extra $30.

It also has a fantastic battery life. Fitbit says it was able to push performance by improving the algorithms the Flex uses to track movement and slice up the collected data. It shows. Fitbit says single a full charge should last about two weeks. I still have not run my review sample down yet after five days of use, and the battery indicator still shows a mostly-full charge of around 60-ish percent.

Fantastically, it’s able to operate on very low power even while performing great feats of syncing. The Flex uses a low-energy Bluetooth connection to talk to a USB dongle on your computer or, more miraculously, your iPhone or Android device. (At least a small number of Android devices, that is. Check to make sure yours is supported before throwing down cash.) If you’ve got your phone in your pocket and a Flex on your wrist, the latter will trickle data to the former all day long. You can check your progress in the app (and get notifications) or tap the device itself to activate the LED lights which indicate how far along towards your goal you are.

All of that combined means you have little reason to ever take it off, which is exactly as an activity tracker should be. The most important thing an activity tracker can do is to be invisibly present. You need to be able to keep it with you all the time and forget you’re even wearing it — meanwhile, it sucks up data about your life, delivers it to an application, and reports back with numbers and charts that are easy to understand. You want something that just melts into your life. After trying very many of these devices over the past several years, I’m convinced that always-on wearability is the most important thing. The Flex pulls that off better than anything that has come before.

It also has good ecosystem capabilities. If you own the Fitbit scale, it will use that device’s data to dynamically report back on your weight and percentage of body fat. If you are a MapMyRun (or Endomondo, Lose It, MyFitnessPal, etc.) user, it will import that data so it can get a better idea of things like calories burned, for example.

It also has tools to help promote weight loss. You can enter a goal and it will tell you how many calories you are allowed per day to get there, based on your activity. But this means manually entering the caloric values of your meals into its database, which is still sort of a chore. You have to be really dedicated to keep up with it.

Finally, the sleep tracking stuff is also quite good. When you go to bed at night, you either tap the device five times, or hit a button in the app to tell it you are going to sleep (and again when you wake). If you forget, you can manually input the hours that you slept. Either way, it will look at your movements to report back with how well you slept during the night. It also has a vibrating alarm to wake you, which is really great.

If you’ve been on the fence about which tracker to get, this is the one. It beats the Basis B1 which still doesn’t have a smartphone app and still requires a cabled connection to sync (although it does track heart rate, which the Flex does not). It beats the Jawbone Up, which now integrates with more third-party apps but doesn’t sync via Bluetooth and doesn’t have an app nearly as good as Fitbit’s. It beats the Withings, which looks really promising but at this point is still vaporware. It beats the BodyMedia Fit which tracks far more about you and even delivers prescriptive feedback, but despite a recent redesign, is still too big to be truly wearable. And it trounces the Nike+ FuelBand, which doesn’t track sleep, and has lots of accuracy problems.

This is the one you’ve been waiting for. And it was worth the wait. Go get it.

via Review: Fitbit Flex Activity Monitor.

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