Wearable Tech and the Internet of Things (Iot)

We continue hearing developments regarding Apple’s highly rumored Augmented Reality headset, Samsung’s  efforts in the same category are mum. One report states that Samsung will fall behind its biggest rival in the smartphone space because it is not focused on an important product category and there are many competitors in the AR headset game; Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Sony, and to an extent, Qualcomm.  Each of these firms have invested heavily in technology that will fuel the growth of AR, and the Samsung does not appear to be bothered that it will be left behind in this category. It's unclear if Samsung is developing a competing device to take on Apple’s AR headset, which is said to be delayed to 2023 due to overheating issues and software problems.  “Big tech companies, rather than smartphone manufacturers, are leading XR devices because they have the necessary content and platforms. Google has an Android OS,  MSFT has Xbox and Sony has PlayStation. It’s risky for Samsung to roll out XR devices, so it has no choice but to stick to foldable smartphones.” Even if Samsung develops products focused on AR, the report states that the company lacks the content and platform to create a metaverse ecosystem. According to Statista, AR, VR headsets, and related devices could contribute to a $300 billion market in 2024, and there will be over 70 million devices responsible for this increase in popularity. To stay competitive with the likes of Apple, Samsung would need to find an ‘XR partner’ who has had years of experience in the content and platform category, while Samsung would offer custom-developed silicon to mass produce such a product. Microsoft and Qualcomm have created such a partnership, so there is no reason why Samsung cannot replicate a similar one.

DARPA is building a manual for repairing war machines that don’t exist yet. That’s the premise of “Autonomous Multimodal Ingestion for Goal-Oriented Support,” or AMIGOS, a new program in which AI and augmented reality are used to assemble real-time training manuals for military mechanics and medics. A augmented reality company Patched Reality, was awarded a $5.8 million contract by DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue-sky projects wing. The goal is to make a program that can guide users through complex operations beyond their existing knowledge, like letting a mechanic repair a machine they’ve never seen before.  “Augmented reality, computer vision, language processing, dialogue processing and reasoning are all AI technologies that have disrupted a variety of industries individually but never in such a coordinated and synergistic fashion,” Charles Ortiz, the principal investigator for AMIGOS, said in a Xerox release. For now, the program will work on creating two component parts for AMIGOS. Xerox describes one of them as an offline tool that can scan text from manuals and other instructional material, like videos, to create the step-by-step guide needed for a task. The second component will be online, and intends to use AI to adapt the manual’s instructions into a real-time instructional guide. The offline component ingests learning material, preparing it for use by the online component, which draws on the ingested manuals to generate an updated guide in real time for the user.  Both machine and human body repair are specialized tasks, with years of training, and often professional requirements for continuing education. No part of AMIGOS seems built to replace that. Instead, by offering the knowledge of a manual in real-time and through an augmented reality headset, AMIGOS could give crucial knowledge to people who would otherwise not have it.

Learning on the fly, even with guidance, isn’t ideal, but it’s much better than a medic simply being unable to treat a life-threatening injury in the field because they are not sure about how to proceed.

The concept of contact lenses that can deliver real-time information to the human eye has been around in movies for years. InWith Corporation, which says it's developed the world's 1st soft electronic contact lens. In an interview with CNET, CEO Michael Hayes says the lenses will work with your smartphone or another external device to show you real-time information about the world around you. "You'll be able to see things such as, What is the speed limit on this road? What direction am I heading? Where is the next exit and how many miles away?"  Hayes also says the lenses will have the ability to help people who suffer from Presbyopia (the loss of your eyes' ability to focus on nearby objects) by adjusting to different scenarios in real-time, eliminating their need for multifocals or reading glasses. To be clear, we haven't seen a demonstration of InWith's technology, but Hayes says the company is aiming for FDA approval this year. For more details watch the video 

For CES 2022, health tech company Movano is announcing the Movano Ring, a wearable that aims to help people affordably monitor chronic illnesses and better understand their data.  The Movano Ring will measure all the basic metrics, including heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), sleep, respiration, temperature, blood oxygen levels, steps, and calories burned. However, instead of a raw data dump, Movano says it’ll distill how your metrics relate to each other “take a more proactive approach to mitigating the risks of chronic disease.” For example, the Movano app might tell you how your exercise habits impact your sleeping patterns or HRV over time.  This isn’t surprising — more wearable makers are shifting away from steps and calories in favor of simplified scores and insights. The Oura Ring, Whoop, and Fitbit all use scores to contextualize sleep and recovery data but mostly focus on telling you whether to push yourself or take it easy on a given day. They’re also accompanied by graphs and lengthy descriptions that can, at times, be overwhelming. Movano says it wants its insights to be more actionable. So far, the app screenshots that Movano showed The Verge don’t show anything groundbreaking, but the way the data is presented is more digestible than many trackers out there.

IDC's report on the wearables market in Q3 of 2021 shows a near 10% increase over the same period last year.  The growth was mainly down to hearables (headphones and earbuds), which grew 26.5% to capture nearly 65% of the market in Q3. Wrist-worn wearables followed with 34.7%. But according to IDC's numbers, demand is slowly shifting from wristbands to watches. Consumers are reportedly looking for more capable devices, and watches have gotten closer in price to bands. Apple held its number one spot, despite having to push the Watch Series 7 to Q4 due to supply issues. Its overall shares declined by 3.6%, but were kept solid by AirPods and Beats sales. Still, Apple grabbed over 53% of the dollar value for the entire market in Q3. Samsung tied Xiaomi for 2nd place with 12.7M shipments in Q3 - a 13.8% increase YoY. This is due to strong Galaxy Watch 4 sales. Xiaomi's market position worsened by nearly 24% over last year, due to its reliance on bands. Finally, Indian brand Imagine Marketing, which sells BoAt devices, found itself in the top 5, thanks to its strong marketing and affordable products.

According to a paywalled report from DigiTimes, Apple and its suppliers have begun working on short-wavelength infrared sensors, a commonly used sensor type for health devices. The new sensors, likely to be fitted on the back of the Apple Watch, will enable the device to measure the amount of sugar in a wearer's blood. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, however, Apple is facing challenges in incorporating blood glucose capabilities into the Apple Watch. Current methods of measuring blood glucose levels include taking a sample of blood and using a medical-grade device. With the Apple Watch, Apple would be looking to take a typically invasive medical practice and make it non-invasive. The Apple Watch, over the years, has gained more comprehensive health features, most recently with the Apple Watch Series 6 that added a blood oxygen sensor. Compared to the first Apple Watch capable of measuring heart rate and primary daily activity, the Apple Watch is now capable of taking an ECG, detecting falls, high and low heart rates, blood oxygen levels, and more. In iOS 15, the Health app added blood glucose highlights as a health metric. ‌iOS 15‌‌ users have to use external hardware to provide the data, but that would change if Apple adds a glucose monitoring feature to a future Apple Watch model.

When you or your kid have any sort of respiratory issue, figuring out what’s happening minute-by-minute — and how well treatment is working — is a stressful, frustrating, and anxiety-filled process. I imagine it’s all of the above and more in the middle of a respiratory disease pandemic.  StethoMe, a team competing in this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition, is looking to help alleviate some of this for children with asthma and their parents. It has built a smart, connected stethoscope that can help parents perform lung examinations at home, sending high-fidelity recordings directly to their doctor and using ML to help flag potential concerns.  Using your phone to tell it what kind of exam you want to perform, and the built-in screen will walk you through the process. It’ll tell you where on the chest to place the device, whether or not the room you’re in is quiet enough, and more. After measuring across 6-8 points, it’ll provide you a report with details like respiratory rate, heart rate, and whether or not it detected any audio abnormalities — including wheezing, rhonci (gurgling sounds caused by fluid), or crackles. From there, you’re able to send a link to the report directly to your kid’s doctor, where they can hear the recorded audio from each point on the chest. A scrubbable spectrogram, meanwhile, provides a visual overview of each recording and flags and labels any abnormalities detected by the system. StethoMe says it has raised a few rounds at this point (a $400K pre-seed, $2M seed, and $2.5M Series A) and received nearly $3M in grants from Poland’s National Center for Research and Development.

Ray-Ban Stories, start at $299 and come in 3 styles, including the iconic Ray-Ban Wayfarer, and 5 hues. Initially, they're being sold at some Ray-Ban stores and at Ray-Ban.com, but what will become of you if you buy them -  Was this accidentally furtive photo- and video-taking turning me into a Facehole?  - Even while pushing a computer that sits on your face and looks quite similar to regular glasses, Facebook and Ray-Ban are emphasizing the importance of making other people aware that you may be recording them.  The glasses can only take videos up to 30 seconds long, and the LED on the front of the glasses is meant to be visible from 25 feet away; it shines the whole time you're taking a video. And after days of trying them out, I still didn't have the sense that I (or anyone, really) needs Ray-Ban Stories. You may need eyeglasses or sunglasses, and a smartphone, too. But it's going to be tough for Facebook to convince most people that they have to have a gadget that can replicate a few of their phone's features while sitting on their face — even one that looks this good.  You can turn on FB Assistant through the View app to use voice commands for taking photos and videos — a way to make it painfully obvious that you're capturing the world around you — but not for anything else, like controlling music playback. Despite these efforts, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was getting away with something while wearing Ray-Ban Stories in public. As far as I could tell, nobody noticed anything unusual about the glasses while chasing my kids around a busy playground, even when I was taking numerous short videos. (It was impossible for me to tell, but perhaps the bright sunlight made the glasses' white LED less noticeable.) I walked into stores with them on, took pictures of myself in mirrors, and nobody even blinked. It would have been easy to use these glasses to invade other people's privacy.  

Using a novel electronic sensor array, researchers in the US have captured the flow of electrical signals within individual cells, as well as between multiple cells in artificial 3D heart tissue. The minimally invasive device, developed by a team headed up at the UCSD, revealed a significant difference between the propagation speeds of signals travelling within and between cells. the researchers studied the propagation of signals within heart muscle cell cultures and engineered 3D cardiac tissues, placed on top of the FET array. For the first time, this allowed them to measure intracellular signals in the 3D tissue. The experiment revealed some particularly intriguing behaviours: showing that electrical signals travel five times faster inside cells than between them. The technique may eventually allow researchers to study and diagnose disorders in vivo in biological tissues. The result could have broad implications for biologists’ understanding of cellular physiology. By identifying irregularities in signal propagations, the team hopes that clinicians could gain a detailed knowledge of heart disorders such as arrhythmia, heart attack and cardiac fibrosis. Although the practical medical use of the device is still some way off, the approach could eventually lead to FET arrays that can be implanted on real biological tissues, with artificial intelligence processing algorithms employed to offer valuable patient diagnoses. The researchers describe their work in Nature Nanotechnology.

Health tech company Abbott is working on “biowearable” devices to track certain elements of one’s body, with the idea that they’ll provide users with more insights about their general health and help them take action. The Lingo devices will measure glucose, ketones and lactate, and eventually they may be able to monitor alcohol levels.

The upcoming biowearables, which aren't intended for medical use, athletes are using a version of the device to help optimize their food intake for their training and competition. The company is planning to expand glucose monitoring use cases to help the public manage things like sleep, weight and energy levels.  The aim of the ketone biowearable is to offer continuous tracking of ketones so that wearers can see how quickly they get into ketosis. That's a state in which a body doesn't have enough carbohydrates to turn into energy and instead burns fat (and generates ketones). With the lactate wearable, Abbott's goal is to continuously measure lactate build up while working out. It says that can provide insights on athletic performance.  It'll be some time before Abbott can bring this tech to the consumer market. If and when the biowearables do arrive and they work as promised, they should help those interested in keeping close tabs on the condition of their body to do so.

In the latest "Power On" newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman talks about what sensors Apple is developing for the Apple Watch and when we’ll see them landing in the actual product. His answer, unfortunately, is not very good for those waiting for a new smartwatch. Gurman says there are 3 big new features in the works: glucose/blood sugar monitoring, the ability to take blood pressure, and determining body temperature. All of these sensors have been rumored for a while, but Bloomberg’s isn’t convinced that these features will launch anytime soon on a new Apple Watch: Don’t expect any of these soon, though. Body temperature was on this year’s roadmap, but chatter about it has slowed down recently. Blood pressure is at least 2-3 years away, while I wouldn’t be surprised if glucose monitoring doesn’t land until later in the second half of the decade  With that in mind, the only new health feature we could expect from the Apple Watch Series 8 could be the ability to detect advanced sleep patterns and sleep apnea, as reported last year by The WSJ.  Not only the next Apple Watch looks way less exciting, but Apple may need to reevaluate its one-year strategy of a new smartwatch every 12 months, as technology isn’t following its marketing strategy.

One of the key aspects of the Apple Watch is the Digital Crown, which lets users navigate the watchOS interface without having to touch the screen all the time. However, it seems that Apple is working on ways to replace it as a new patent shows an Apple Watch with optical sensors where the Digital Crown is currently located.  As reported by Patently Apple, the USPTO this week published a new patent from Apple that reveals how the Digital Crown on the Apple Watch can be replaced by optical sensors that are able to identify user gestures.

The patent is named “Watch with optical sensor for user input” and demonstrates how the company can use new sensors to let users scroll through the interface while reducing the number of moving parts in the Apple Watch with the removal of the Digital Crown. Optical sensors would detect the gestures made by users to turn them into system controls. Apple notes in the patent that removing the Digital Crown can not only make the Apple Watch more durable, but can also free up space that can be used by other components such as new sensors or even a larger battery.  e.g. the user can provide motions and gestures near the input component that the input component can detect and interpret and user inputs to control an aspect of the watch. The motions and gestures provided by the user can be directly detected with optical systems of the input component, so that the number of moving parts are reduced and space within the watch is more efficiently utilized.

Senseglove Nova is an overall big improvement with regard to the previous version of Senseglove gloves. The only worsening is that the force feedback is slightly weaker, but there have been huge improvements in comfort, usability, design, and tactile feedback. Using these gloves wirelessly has been very cool and I think that with this iteration they are finally usable by every company. The price, $5000, if your company can spare the money but make sure to get good effective and efficient training. Haptics in VR is still in the early stages, so this product is not perfect: the force feedback emulation still needs a lot of work to appear realistic. But when it works well, or where the vibrations on the fingertips are coherent with what you are touching in VR can feel a bit magical, and help you see the potential of this technology, that is the one of increasing the realism of the virtual simulation. The purpose of these gloves (according to the author) is to give decent haptic feedback for an affordable price, and he thinks that it has been fulfilled. If you want perfect haptics, instead, you have probably to wait for more iterations of these devices to start seeing something meaningful for you.

HaptX has been working on haptic gloves that employ microfluidic feedback technology, with an aim toward helping enterprise customers working in VR and robotics. In a statement to GeekWire, HaptX founder and CEO Jake Rubin said Meta’s gloves “appear to be substantively identical to HaptX’s patented technology.”  Rubin pointed to core components of the Meta prototype, including a silicone-based microfluidic tactile feedback laminate and pneumatic control architecture.  In its news release and a longer blog post Tuesday, Meta listed examples of where its team was pushing human-computer interaction forward and “creating new breakthroughs to make haptic gloves a reality.” Among those breakthroughs, Meta listed microfluidics and said it was “developing the world’s first high-speed microfluidic processor.” Rubin said HaptX welcomes “interest and competition in the field of microfluidic haptics; however, competition must be fair for the industry to thrive.”

He added that the startup has not heard from Meta but that HaptX would “look forward to working with them to reach a fair and equitable arrangement that addresses our concerns and enables them to incorporate our innovative technology into their future consumer products.” GeekWire has reached out to Meta for reaction to HaptX’s assertions and will update this story when we hear back. Update: Meta declined to respond to HaptX’s assertions.

Oura’s Generation 3 smart ring will have a whole new slate of features, including period prediction, blood oxygen monitoring, and real-time heart rate tracking. The new ring will jump from 3 to 7 temperature sensors and add a pulse oxygen sensor, Oura CEO Harpreet Rai told The Verge.  A new, green LED light will monitor heart rate throughout the day. Starting at the end of 2021, users will also be able to record their heart rate during exercise and see information about heart rate recovery after a workout is done. The upgrades underscore the company’s focus on health, Rai says, particularly the period prediction feature. The new ring will use shifts in temperature and user feedback to predict when a user might get their period up to 30 days in advance. Body temperature changes through the menstrual cycle, rising just before ovulation and falling as mensuration begins. Oura is also moving to a membership model for its app, priced at $5.99 a month. Users who upgrade from an older ring to the new model will get a discount on the hardware and a free lifetime membership.  The Generation 3 ring will start shipping November 15th. Read on for more details.

As has become something of a ritual, tools-seller and repair-advocacy group iFixit has published a detailed teardown of the latest Apple product. This time, we get a look at the innards of the Apple Watch Series 7.  Of course, iFixit's teardowns are as much about assessing the serviceability of a device as they are about geeking out about hardware changes. iFixit gave the Watch a 6/10 repairability score, citing its "modular construction" and "straightforward access to the screen and battery." Knocks against the Watch include the absence of a service manual and the fact that the screen must be unglued and reglued with every repair. The Apple Watch Series 7 appears to use an on-cell touch OLED panel, the same type seen in the iPhone 13 line. Consulting with a former Apple engineer, iFixit suggests that supply challenges related to this display tech are likely the reason the Apple Watch launched a bit late this year and why the device didn't get a release date in last month's keynote announcing it.  Oh yeah the diagnostic port is gone, iFixit speculating Apple now uses a wireless interface to service the Watch and reasonably ventures a guess that this may be a test drive for the eventual removal of the iPhone's lone port. Watch's rated battery life the same as the 2020 model, despite the larger, more power-hungry screen.

With the iOS 15 launch today, some iPhone users will have the option to share data from their Health app directly with their doctors through their electronic medical records. Six health record companies are participating in the initial launch, and some of those companies say that doctors and medical practices on their systems are eager to start using the feature.  People will be able to share their Health app data directly into electronic medical records with the launch of iOS 15. It could help doctors keep better track of how patients do outside of office visits.  People who use the option can use the new sharing function on the Health app to let their doctor see data like their heart rate and time spent exercising, as collected through the Health app. It could help physicians keep a closer eye on metrics that might be relevant to a patient’s health without the patient having to take an extra step to manually share the information.  While the data provided by wearable devices and other health apps can be useful, doctors often say they’re worried about information overload. Joros at Allscripts says the layout of the dashboard within Apple’s health record might help make the flood of information less overwhelming. DrChrono plans to roll the Health app feature to a first set of initial users before expanding gradually to its full customer base, which includes around 4,000 medical practices. The company can track how often the feature is used, and Kivatinos says it plans to collect data on how many patients end up sharing their Health app information into the health record.

Xiaomi is challenging Facebook in the wearables arena by launching its own smart glasses. The device won’t only be capable of taking photos, but also of displaying messages and notifications, making calls, providing navigation and translating text in real time in front of your eyes. Like FB, Xiaomi is also putting emphasis on the device’s lightness despite its features. At 51 grams, though, it’s a bit heavier than the social network’s Ray-Ban Stories. In addition, the glasses also has an indicator light that shows when the 5-megapixel camera is in use.  Xiaomi’s Smart Glasses are powered by a quad-core ARM processor and runs on Android, using MicroLED imaging technology, having a higher brightness and longer lifespan than OLED. The company says the technology has a simpler structure that enabled it to create a compact display with individual pixels sized at 4μm. You won’t be able to view the images you take in color, though — Xiaomi says it opted to use a monochrome display solution “to allow sufficient light to pass through complicated optical structures.”

Its smart glasses won’t be just a 2nd screen for your phone. It’s independently capable of many things, such as selecting the most important notifications to show you, including smart home alarms and messages from important contacts. The device’s navigation capability can display maps and directions in front of your eyes. It can also show you the number of whoever’s currently calling your phone, and you can take the call using the smart glasses’ built in mic and speakers.  That mic will be able to pick up speech, as well, which Xiaomi’s proprietary translating algorithm can translate in real time. The glasses’ translation feature also works’ on written text and text on photos captures through its camera. Unfortunately, the company has yet to announce a price or a launch date for the glasses, but we’ll keep you updated when it does.