Developers of wearable technology have been gaining inroads into consumer end-markets, with the likes of virtual reality glasses, smart watches, fitness bands and other such devices becoming increasingly available and affordable. While the likes of the upcoming Microsoft HoloLens and AppleWatch bode well for consumer-facing products, the bigger potential is for platform and hardware makers that stand to gain from the boom in this space, just like how Qualcomm experienced a renaissance with the rise of ARM-based computing in mobile devices. One such startup that will stand to gain with the rise of wearable computing is Tel Aviv-based LifeBEAM, which designs and builds wearable instruments for measuring human performance.

Aerospace tech made accessible

LifeBEAM’s main products are hats and helmets with built-in heart rate and performance trackers. The novelty is with the fact that the technology behind these devices originated from the aerospace industry, in particular fighter pilot helmets. The startup is actually founded by former Israeli air force pilots who aimed to incorporate military technology into consumer products. Trackers embedded on these headgear help reduce the discomfort and weight associated with cyclists’ and runners’ having to wear chest straps for electro-cardiogram needs.

The startup launched its first product through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo in 2013, and marginally exceeded its goal by 29%. The company also provides its bio-sensing technologies to other brands and partners. In November, it was announced that Samsung has picked LifeBEAM’s technology as one of the sensors that will power its Simband, which is the Korean company’s reference design for upcoming health-tracking wearables.

Finding the right form factors

For LifeBEAM, it’s a big deal to find the right form factors to build its technology into. “Our challenge is to keep finding ways to integrate our bio sensing technology into real products that users want,” says Omri Yoffe, LifeBEAM founder, in an interview with VR World. “This keeps us at the front line as a company who understands both the barriers and opportunities in these different wearable form factors and possible products and content to be created out of them.”

According to Yoffe, there are certain industries that more easily warm to wearable technologies, although it may not be fair to identify any single industry that is dominant. For the  company, leading consumer brands are a good place to start when looking for trends in this industry. “The emerging wave of wearable technologies popular in the last year or so apply to consumer lifestyle, safety and security, enterprises, health and such industries,” he says. “There are different barriers to entry and key factors, such as policy, privacy and pricing, at play.”

Finding the right applications

Yoffe says there will always be early adopters and that “the most natural place to start with should be the leading consumer brands that will look for feasible ways of implementing wearable technology into their current and future products and services.” He adds that “the goal is to provide more value to the users and consumers.”

According to Yoffe, health and fitness remain to be at the forefront of wearables, because of the relevance of bio- and motion-sensing technologies to this industry. “Looking at 2014 and seeing the main trends for 2015, there is no doubt that the well-being and fitness markets are currently pioneering vehicles for wearable technology adoption, because these provide the target users a real and valuable way to track their personal wellness and well-being.” he says. “This is done in a relatively seamless and convenient, but still fashionable way,” he adds.

A focus on user experience

There are still challenges, however. For LifeBEAM, these include optimizing devices for the component sizes, connectivity, convenience and wearability. “Smart textile production also involves questions about washability and pricing,” Yoffe says, adding that even power consumption and the “lack of new disruptive and mature charging technologies” can also be an issue that builders of wearable tech need to address.

But going beyond devices and sensors, the wearable technology needs to take into account user experience. “We need ways to provide users a simplified, unified and insightful feedback mechanism, without the need for extra effort in terms of both wearing a designated wearable form factor (such as wrist bands) and the need to drill down into lots of saturated data and statistics.”

Beyond glasses and watches

The future is not necessarily about watches and glasses. Yoffe says that segmentation borders between two major groups. First is wearable and sensing tech embedded into clothing and apparel. “Wearable sensing solutions are invisibly implemented into all sorts of wearable gear apparel, with focus on low power consumption and wireless connectivity to a display-enabled device and/or the cloud.”

The second group involves purpose-built devices. “These are consumer electronics — watches, earbuds, phones and maybe a bit of smart glasses — participating as the user’s data aggregation, display and communication ‘hub’ to be able to simplify data collection and pitch the data to the user in real time.”

At this point, the job of companies that produce wearable tech is to make this technology more accessible to the end user — in essence making it invisible so it becomes more easily integrated into our lives, Yoffe says. “We need more focus on the UX and the ability to provide the end user an insightful, meaningful, simplified and unified feedback about his daily activity and personal well-being, and less focus on the raw bio-sensing parameters the and other more techy parts.”

The post LifeBEAM: User Experience Should be Focus of Wearable Tech appeared first on VR World.

Physiological monitoring combined with bio-mathematical modeling provides information aimed at improving health-related decisions. LifeQ based in Atlanta, Georgia is partnering with tech companies and scientists hoping to enable the understanding and management of physiology, behavior, and health. To this end, you could see a demo in their CES booth, as well as in the booths of Texas Instruments, Bosch, and Atmel .

Executive founder of LifeQ, Dr. Riaan Conradie said: “We can now deliver incredible insights to people about their bodies, potentially even predicting a heart attack.” The company goal is to help people really understand their own bodies so they can make decisions based on highly personalized health records and insights. It provides an on-demand record of one’s physiology and health. Using this data, individuals can make intelligent choices regarding their lifestyle, food, exercise, and even medications, all with one device.

Dr. Franco Du Preez, systems biologist, is deeply involved with LifeQ.

Franco Du Preez, Ph.D., world-renowned systems biologist who has authored several articles on the topic, applies computational systems biology to real-world health problems. He is the Chief Science Officer at LifeQ. Working with him in this unique field are computer scientists, electronic design engineers, mathematical statisticians, researchers, biomedical engineers, software architects, and scientists. They coordinate their expertise in an aggressive effort. The result: one device

LifeQ Lens captures physiological info.

A mighty three some, LifeQ consists of Lens, Core, and Link. LifeQ Lens is a multi-wavelength optical sensor that can be integrated into most wearable devices. It then monitors a range of key metrics with laboratory-level accuracy using the company’s proprietary algorithm. LifeQ Core translates the raw data from the Lens through biologically-orientated mathematical models. These models are turned into digital, virtual simulations of your body’s physiological systems. LifeQ Link is the open-access platform through which the company’s cross industry partners can use LifeQ’s technology.

Athletes can personally use the real-time information to regulate, increase or decrease their activities. Individuals with a nutritional interest can keep tabs on their nutrition by measuring calorie intake and calorie burn rate. Medical personnel can use LifeQ to improve diagnoses or manage a chronic condition.

Finally, on a more global scale, the company foresees the data generated by LifeQ’s platform providing population-level analysis of health and physiology which can lead to research never before possible. The company is looking forward to being able to monitor clinical trials which could potentially help create safer medicines and more effective treatments.

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There is no denying that Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) is a different company from the days when Steve Jobs walked the halls of the company’s Cupertino headquarters. Apple is now run by Tim Cook, Steve’s operations guru that managed to enable Apple’s ruthless efficiency and even more importantly their absolute profit margins. It comes as little surprise that Apple comes off as feeling dull to many since Jobs’ death in four years ago in 2011. Sure, four years is a long time in the tech world, but when it comes to a company like Apple, it takes time for someone’s impact to wane, like Jobs’.

Let’s not forget that Jobs’ helped Apple introduce a plethora of new products to the market, all with varying levels of wild success, but one of the most important things about the man is that he stuck to his guns. Very rarely did Jobs compromise or waver in his decisions and one of those decisions was that the iPhone needed to be a certain size in order to be “usable” or user-friendly. Before his death, Jobs in fact stated that nobody would want to buy a big phone, which proved incredibly wrong as the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5S have been competing with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy, HTC One and Sony Xperia phones, all of which now come in 5 inch or larger screen sizes.

It comes as little surprise that Apple today announced that it would be releasing the iPhone 6 at a screen size of 4.7 inches as well as the iPhone 6 plus at a whopping 5.5 inches, something Jobs probably would’ve fired someone over. However, after Jobs’ passing, Apple started to see challengers and face challenges from competitors that Jobs somewhat foresaw (in Samsung (KRX:005930)) but also didn’t foresee (LG (KRX:066570). The reality is that many users started to leave Apple for Android devices for one reason or another. At first, it was LTE because the iPhone didn’t have it and Android phones did, then it became screen size because Android phones had bigger higher resolution screens and now Apple does too. But until today, Apple clearly feared the implications of not having a competitive “big” phone, some may argue that can be considered a phablet (at 5.5 inches).

In fact, some people are already discussing selling their iPad retinas and just getting an iPhone 6 Plus to simplify their usage needs. Truthfully, there is no denying that Apple has the most diverse set of smartphones for consumers to buy, ranging from the iPhone 5C all the way up to the iPhone Plus. However, Apple may have made a grave mistake by not offering a size smaller than 4.7 inches because there are a lot of people out there have stuck with iPhones because of their size. The new Apple is focusing on what is driving market demand and where the market appears to be going, which has been bigger and bigger phones for the last two years running.

The new iPhone 6 does bring some new things to the table for Apple, which includes NFC technology, something that Apple’s devices have lacked for quite some time. The iPhone 6 also sports an entirely new camera, which promises to once again deliver incredibly competitive images against the rest of the competition. But really, the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are fairly dull and merely represent Apple’s pivoting to market demands and very little by ways of innovation.

Sure, the new phones use Apple’s new A8 SoC, which happens to be the world’s first 20nm SoC, but the truth is that it mostly appears to be an incremental improvement over the iPhone 5S’ A7 chip. It does pack a whopping 2 billion transistors into an absolutely tiny area, allowing Apple to continue to use minuscule battery sizes and still get fairly good battery life. Apple’s 64-bit lead will also be extended with the A8 processor, as none of the Android vendors have really shipped anything with a 64-bit on Android until recently. So, Apple’s lead here continues to be strong.

In fact, Apple really seems to be focusing very heavily on hiring very talented individuals and there appears to be a search for top talent, one that the company has never seen before. It appears that Apple is compensating for their lack of vision (sans Jobs) with a focus on having the best tech and the best execution of that tech that could possibly exist. This can be seen across the board throughout the company’s various divisions and there’s a very good chance we’ll see a result of this new culture in the iPhone 6’s launch and whether or not users experience any issues like previous Apple early adopters.

The Apple Watch

Now, the Apple Watch is technically the company’s very first new product line since Steve Jobs and Apple launched the iPad back in 2010. However, this new product won’t actually be available until 2015, meaning that Apple will have had five years between new product lines and most of those years were without Jobs at the helm. It comes at little surprise that the new Apple Watch comes off as incredibly ugly to some (if not many) and very likely would have never passed Jobs’ muster. Some may even argue that Apple’s new watch is uglier than Motorola’s already announced Moto 360 and that today marks the day that Motorola out-designed Apple.

Apple’s clear focus on health was noticed by us back in July when it was announced that the new Apple Watch would have a very heavy health focus. Back then, it was reported that it may have been a mistake to release such a device as an overly health focused device, and if one would look at it now, it has a very strong health focus and may lose some of a smart watch’s utility by not emulating more of what Android wear does. But if one were dig deeply, it can be seen that Apple clearly wants to do more with the smartwatch but doesn’t quite know any killer apps other than health tracking/fitness right now. And at the $350 price and iOS exclusivity they are going to have a hard time selling these to people that aren’t already fitbit or some other type of health tracker.

The fact is that Apple is not ready yet with its first new product in five years, but it is clearly afraid of losing the war of perception and decided to announce it at today’s event even though they really won’t be ready with it until next year. This is another thing that Jobs never did, if he had a product to announce, he was ready to ship it. This is just another sign of how things have changed inside of Apple and what we can expect to see for years to come. A more nimble, fearful, and competitive company that will very likely continue to react to market demands in ways that the old Apple probably never would have.

Many people talk about how Jobs’ departure effectively marked the beginning of the end for the company. But the reality is that if Jobs still were in charge today, there’s a very good chance that the company would not be anywhere near as competitive as it is today. There’s a very good chance that Jobs’ own beliefs may have prevented him from really doing what the market demanded. Sure, Jobs was the kind of person that told the market what they wanted (iPhone, iPad, Macbook, etc) but that doesn’t last forever either. Tim Cook has done a great job of keeping Apple going and they appear to be hiring all the right kinds of people to keep the company innovating, even if in small steps.

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Apple has been pushing heath and fitness heavily with their most recent campaign for the iPhone. This can be most noticeable in their recent ad campaign featuring Apple’s iPhone and a series of fitness applications and accessories, which include a multitude of wearables. Their campaign states, “You’re more powerful than you think.”

So, what is Apple getting at here, exactly? That the iPhone, and Apple, can be at the very core of your physical and health success. Surely, there are plenty of people that are already using many of these devices on both their Android and iOS devices, so that doesn’t necessarily set Apple apart from the rest. What will set Apple apart from the rest is how they will very likely incorporate a lot of these different wearables’ functionality into a single device.

According to some of our sources, Apple is looking to make the iWatch a very health-centric device rather than one that is about accomplishing tasks and being an extended digital assistant (See: Google Now + Android Wear). However, there are concerns that Apple’s focus on health with the iWatch may actually hurt them and could have sent the company back to the drawing board in order to increase the overall daily ‘usefullness’ of the device outside of health applications. But even so, Apple is rumored to be purchasing certain types of sensors that will be able to measure your heart rate and sweat in addition to movement data. They’re also becoming ever more serious about how they test these sensors and the functionality of their platform as they’ve been rumored to be spending millions on medical equipment from various manufacturers. The idea that Apple is buying medical equipment should be a pretty ridiculous one, but once you think about how serious Apple is about launching their first new product line in over 4 years, you’ll realize that they don’t want to make any mistakes.

So, there’s no doubt that Apple’s iWatch is going to have a health focus. The real question will be whether or not the iWatch will be almost entirely health focused, or if they will try to build in Siri integration and make the iWatch both functional and health conscious. Because, right now, Google and Microsoft don’t really have much by ways of health applications of their own, let alone hardware. So if Apple can build an iWatch that is health focused, they may already have a significant leg up on Google and Microsoft. Now, if you add heavy Siri integration and other helpful features there’s a good chance that Apple could once again set the standard for a new type of technology, but this time in wearables.

As of right now, I don’t think anyone has any concrete idea of when Apple will launch the iWatch, but from what it looks like it is still majorly in development and we probably won’t see it until next year. Obviously, if they launch sooner, it will put a greater burden on their competitors, but as of right now most of the smart watches from their competitors either haven’t launched yet or lack a native health functionality. Samsung and Qualcomm certainly have the lead in terms of health focus with their smartwatches, but it remains to be seen how far they’ll go and how they’ll compete against an Apple iWatch.

The post Apple's iWatch to Have Major Health Focus, A Mistake? appeared first on VR World.