A new type of toothbrush is looking to change the health world. Kolibree, a French startup, has developed a Bluetooth-enabled toothbrush that connects to your smartphone or tablet, tracks and displays your brushing habits, and allows you to compete for being the best brusher of teeth in the family!
The conversation surrounding the quantified-self and measuring all-that-is-measurable has become a very hot tech meme and has even gone so far to successfully fund a Kickstarter for measuring brainwaves. Although brainwave monitoring is a small deviation from what’s popular, everyone has seen no shortage of these devices for measuring physical activity but even then, these devices are mostly limited to running and bicycling at best. What about everyone else?
Trace is a device currently on Kickstarter that wants to bring accurate tracking to surfers, snowboarders, and skaters that goes beyond the simple accelerometers in our smartphones and little wristbands.
Activity trackers have become very popular among fitness enthusiasts, quantified-selfers, and gadget fans but are they making any sort of difference? I had mixed feelings about the Nike Fuelband when I reviewed it a year ago and Wired thinks it isn’t making you any healthier either. But maybe these glorified bluetooth accelerometers are missing a crucial feature: brainwave monitoring
It was 2006 when Nike turned the most simple of sports into a key driver for adopting a healthier lifestyle. 7 years later, Nike+ now has about 7 million users. Socially rich data is key for any quantified self project, and running is no exception. The success of Nike+ is an example of how measuring performance is useful to gaining key insight. For users, they get to understand their running patterns better. For Nike, servers worth of Nike+ data can be turned into strategic business decisions to improve company performance.
The quantified self-movement (QS) is a hot topic in 2013 and focuses on using sensors and other trackers to acquire self-knowledge for the end goal of gaining deeper insight about personal habits. For example, I use Nike+ to log my daily run performance. I also make a list of my diet for that day and compare it to how well I performed. I am hoping that after a couple of months of use, I can figure out what the optimal diet is for me before I go for a run or engage in physical activities such as sports. Other examples can include measuring coffee intake vs. productivity or sleep activity vs. diet. With the inclusion of Big Data—the ability to process large amounts of data quickly—people are looking to contextualize all the data available on their laptops, mobile devices, or even social media platforms.
Whether or not you are actively participating in the QS movement, companies are adopting the method to find new ways to measure performance metrics. By measuring employee activity through sensors, these new metrics will be aggregated to redefine what being a successful worker means.
