GigaOM » Fitbit

Put your Fitbit through the washing machine again? Here’s an app that could replace it

Eliza Kern — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:00:36 +0000

I got a Fitbit (see disclosure) last November when it started to seem like all of my friends and co-workers were sporting tracking devices to measure their movement and exercise. I’ve grown to adore the little black device, taking a few more laps around the block on my way home to hit 10,000 steps per day, and running back inside the house if I forget to clip it to my pocket before leaving for work in the morning. I love checking the charts and graphs on the iPhone app that show my fitness progress over time. It’s fair to say I’d be bummed if I lost the device.

So what if you do lose your tracking device and don’t want to buy another one? Or maybe you’re unwilling to spend more than $100 on one in the first place, about the average price for a Fitbit or Jawbone Up? I’ve been trying out Moves, a free iPhone app released earlier this year, and have been impressed by how well the app tracks my movement throughout the day. So far, it would be a decent replacement for my Fitbit if I ever lost one, and with a pricetag of $0, it’s a pretty great deal if you’re not sure whether you want to track your steps or not.

The idea behind Moves is that most of us are carrying smartphones around during the day anyway, and the accelerometer inside the phone mimics a lot of the technology inside popular tracking devices. So CEO Sampo Karjalainen set out to create a mobile app that would approximate the experience with devices many of us already own, but at a much more affordable price, hoping the app would appeal to more casual exercisers.

“The whole idea was just to make it really effortless,” he said, noting that for a lot of people, devices like the Fitbit just aren’t as appealing. “They have this active sports image which doesn’t really fit with a lot to people, who might not see themselves as active sports people.”

The app shows you steps you’ve moved every day, minutes spent active, as well as locations you’ve been to if you enable the tracking features. Karjalainen said the app, which got $1.6 million in venture backing from Lifeline Ventures and PROfounders Capital, has been downloaded 1.5 million times since the launch, although he wouldn’t say how many of those users are actively using Moves. The company is working on building an Android version and an API.

It took some time for me to adjust to the Moves app and the simplicity of the screen compared to Fitbit — you can’t enter your weight or food intake, and it doesn’t provide you with stats on calories burned or let you adjust for your height and weight. And apps dedicated to running like Nike+ or Runkeeper might still be better answers for serious runners. However, the steps and distance tracking on Moves provided nearly identical data to my Fitbit, so if you’re just looking to hit 10,000 steps every day and stay active, it’s a great solution. And it did track my runs pretty accurately as well.

The only caveat is that you have to carry your phone with you everywhere for it to work. But chances are, if you’re the kind of person who’s interested in GPS fitness tracking, carrying your phone around probably won’t be an issue for you.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Keeping Fitbit safe from hackers and cheaters with FitLock

Amanda Alvarez — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:20:11 +0000

As if having the caloric details of your sex life posted publicly wasn’t enough, new research has exposed additional security vulnerabilities in the popular Fitbit fitness tracking devices (See disclosure). A team from Florida International University has shown that Fitbits can be subject to attacks including denial of service, injection, and data capture.

Many of these problems stem from the fact that the Fitbit uses plain HTTP in its communications, exposing usernames, passwords, and data to opportunistic attackers. A suite of tools to probe the Fitbit created by the researchers was able to capture data from any Fitbit tracker within a radius of 15 feet. Another type of attack they tested forced the Fitbit to attempt frequent data upload, draining the battery 21 times faster than with normal once a day uploading.

An additional problem the researchers identified is an absence of a data consistency check on the Fitbit and its associated online social network. For example, they were able to inject 12.6 million steps into a user account, which the system translated into only 0.02 miles traveled, based on the initial calibration to the user’s stride length. This kind of data injection could be exploited by cheats, people who don’t want to work for the badges and monetary rewards that are available to fitness over-achievers.

While such an attack on a given individual might seem far-fetched, hackers could be motivated to expose or misuse sensitive personal health data. The consequences of that exposure could be no more than embarrassment for the Fitbit’s owner, but the security and privacy ramifications could go much deeper for similarly vulnerable wireless devices used in larger settings by healthcare companies.

The researchers also highlighted a few more bizarre “mule” attacks, such as attaching the Fitbit to a spinning rope or a car wheel (you can “burn” about 350 calories in 20 minutes with the latter method).

To combat these attacks, they developed FitLock, a hacked together defense system that includes encryption. A data consistency check also verifies new uploads against stride length and basal metabolic rate so that number of steps, distance traveled, and calories burned correspond. According to the recently released research, this additional security results in a negligible increase in processing time of 37 ms, about 2.4 percent more than normal Fitbit overhead. They also propose an extra step to thwart mule attacks: using a smaller, more accurate GPS chip to tell whether location is not changing (rope attack) while steps are being taken, or when the location is changing far too much (wheel attack).

The attacks that are averted with FitLock are not unique to Fitbit or other sensing devices. Insulin pumps and cardiac defibrillators, for example, could be manipulated with the same methods, with much more dire consequences.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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Mobile first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 06:55:19 +0000

The mobile platform wars escalated once again in the first quarter of 2012 as BlackBerry finally took the wraps off its much-anticipated new operating system. Meanwhile Android continued to build on its dominance both worldwide and in the U.S., cementing a two-horse race with Apple.

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Wearable design, Misfit and the age of the glanceable UI

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:00:20 +0000

The designers at startup Misfit Wearables had a goal to make their wearable health gadget so beautiful that customers might keep it on even if it was completely broken. The company’s quarter-sized Shine gizmo — made from aerospace-grade aluminum, lined with a halo of LEDs, and fitted with a variety of accessories for the wrist, neck, and body — is supposed to reach its first 5,000 crowd-funded customers in early June, at which point we’ll see if the pint-sized device is as beloved by its customers as it is by its creators.

But the story of the year and half-old venture capital-backed Misfit isn’t just a tale about a startup building a coveted Apple-inspired gadget. Though it certainly is that — the company was founded on the day that Steve Jobs died, “Misfit” is a tribute to Jobs and Apple’s ads to think differently, and one of the company’s co-founders is Apple’s former CEO John Sculley (who was instrumental in pushing out Jobs in the 80′s).

Misfit has emerged at the intersection of a few key trends in 2013 that are shaping wearable computing, data, and design. These trends include the emergence of next-generation wearables that have more mainstream appeal, the development of the lean hardware movement that is using crowd funding to experiment, the collection of data that uses narrative and emotion to create an impact, and, most importantly, the introduction of a new type of user interface, which Misfit CEO Sonny Vu has coined as “the glanceable UI.”

Next-gen wearables

Accelerometers and sensors have been around for years. One of the pioneers of the space, Fitbit (see disclosure), is already a five-year-old company. Back in 2008, it was novel to just have a device that could track your movements, count your steps and calories, and sync with your laptop or smart phone.

But in 2013 the hardware for wearable devices has become a commodity, and the success of companies creating wearable computing will depend on the design of the device, the functionality of the software, and how the software and the gadget work together to provide value to the user’s life.

Misfit is part of this second wave of design-centric wearable computing. “We’re very focused on the packaging,” Vu told me with a smile during an interview last week at Misfit’s modest office in Daly City, California. Misfit was founded by Vu, Sculley, and Sridhar Iyengar, who was a co-founder with Vu at his former company AgaMatrix. AgaMatrix created the first FDA-approved glucose meter to work with the iPhone, giving Vu and Iyengar years of rare experience building wearable devices.

While crowd-funding helped fund Misfit’s first run of the Shine, Misfit is actually backed by some of the most well-known investors in the Valley, including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. Along with its team in Daly City, it has a group of software developers in Vietnam, and makes its gadget in Japan and South Korea.

Think differently

For Misfit, design innovation has been fundamental to creating its hardware. The company doesn’t use words like sensors, or accelerometers on its website, and is trying to look far beyond the niche, early-adopter “quantified self” community.

The first aspect of its design innovation is in the materials. While most wearables on the market are made of rubber or plastic, Misfit’s Shine is almost completely made out of metal — a first in the industry. The metal is part of what makes the device so beautiful and also gives the feeling of value to the user. The metal also makes it very durable; the Shine is fully water proof.

There are reasons why competitors haven’t used metal for pint-sized wearables. The Shine might look awesome, but it takes four different factories just to make the various pieces of the shell and the metal also has created some usability restrictions. The Shine has to be placed directly onto (actually touching) the face of the mobile phone to sync it; the wireless signals wouldn’t escape the metal casing without that.

“The next time I think of doing an entirely metal product, someone shoot me,” laughed Vu.

Steve Jobs also famously went to great lengths for hardware design, like the iPhone’s unscratchable glass screen, and the handle on top of the original iMac.

Another unusual design element that Misfit deemed necessary is that the Shine isn’t chargeable. It’s got a coin battery, which lasts 4 to 6 months before it needs to be replaced. Pretty much every other wearable on the market is chargeable and requires weekly, or even daily, charging. “We had an almost religious belief that wearables should not be charged. You don’t charge the buttons on your jacket, or the backpack on your back,” Vu said.

The decision to forgo charging also created usability restrictions, namely power management. The Shine needed bright LED lights on its display, the LEDs needed to shine through the metal casing, and the battery had to run the processor and keep time for up to 6 months. Pairing it with a wireless charging dock would have been far easier and would have enabled far more functionality.

A third counterintuitive design choice is that the Shine is a circle, but uses an inverted edge to connect with various accessories — there’s a sports and leather wristband accessory, a magnet clip for clothing, and a necklace that hangs it from your neck. Vu said that quintessential form choice will make the Shine more accessible for people’s various needs.

For example, many women won’t put anything on their wrist, which means wrist-only devices like the FuelBand or Jawbone’s UP are neglecting a good portion of potential users. From a business perspective, accessories can also add substantially to margins, which, for Misfit, could be tight given the Shine is a higher-end device made completely of metal that is trying to hit the price point of the Fitbit.

These types of design decisions have created a device that is substantially different from Misfit’s larger and older competitors. Vu said before founding the company and designing the Shine, the team read every single negative review of the Fitbit, the Nike Fuelband, and the Jawbone products.

Glanceable UI

Beyond the hardware, Misfit is also innovating around the UI and how the user experiences feedback from the Shine. The design team made the decision to remove a digital screen interface entirely and replace it with a halo of tiny LED lights. They also removed an on/off button. Part of the reason they made these changes was because of the power management issue — there’s no way the device could power a brightly-lit screen and not be a chargeable device.

But the move was also a decision to head in the direction of what Vu called a “glanceable UI.” Designers have for years been focused on UIs for the laptop and cell phone screens, but are more recently just beginning to create interfaces for the very quick glance that is needed for a wearable device.

The Shine takes what the Nike Fuelband started with its colored-LED display and basically pares it down. Shine users can check to see how complete the circle of lights is around the gizmo to determine if they’re meeting their daily fitness goal. By briefly touching the center of the Shine, the lights can quickly configure into a clock to tell the time, meaning the Shine is also a smart watch, too.

If you hear wearable designers and developers talk about user experience, they’ll commonly talk about truncating content. Google’s Glass advocate Timothy Jordan explained recently at SXSW that an app built for Glass, like the New York Times app, has to show enough of a snippet of information to be conveyed in just a look. The New York Times Glass app shows headlines and images, but not full articles.

Likewise, health and body information on a wearable device like the Shine should be able to be conveyed in a second or two. The cell phone app that syncs with the Shine houses the rest of the functionality.

A glanceable UI is about creating a second’s worth of meaning out of important and impactful data. Whether that’s a moment to convey how well you’re doing toward your daily fitness goal or a single blinking light to encourage more movement. As Om wrote recently, as data becomes the world’s currency, data without emotion, empathy or narrative is meaningless. Wearable gadgets can track as much data as they want, but if the user isn’t exposed to the data in a way that impacts their lives, and in a time frame that they can work with, then the device has failed.

Getting to market

Some of Misfit’s design decisions were controversial even within the company, which is why Misfit decided to test out to see if customers would be interested in a metal, non-rechargeable, no-screen, wearable gadget. Turns out, at least on Indiegogo, they are. The company raised over $800,000 from almost 8,000 funders who wanted to buy the Shine early.

Crowd-funding was a way for Misfit to experiment. It’s actually gotten millions from traditional Valley investors to launch its products more commercially. But crowd-funding is becoming a common way for the so-called lean hardware movement to operate. Hardware innovation was front and center at SXSW this year.

Misfit is shipping its first 5,000 Shines to customers in early June and another 7,000 or 8,000 in the second half of June. Shortly after that the Shine will go on sale at retail outlets for around the same price point as the Fitbit, which is around $99.

The Shine is only Misfit’s first product, which Vu calls Product Zero. They’re also working on a device called Mars, or Project One, which will be launched early next year. On the topic of Mars, Vu would only say that it would be a wearable but one that has a longer battery, makes more use of data, and has a different material and different shape.

While Misfit is just a young company, and has yet to deliver its gadgets to its first customers, it’s operating at that the intersection of some of the Valley’s most interesting trends, including the power of design, the next-generation of more mainstream wearables, the importance of impactful data, and a coming era that will feature the glanceable UI.

I look forward to hearing about the first Shine users’ experiences this Summer. In November we’ll be talking more about these issues of design, connectedness and experience at our third annual RoadMap event in San Francisco. Tickets will go on sale this summer, but you can sign up to be one of the first to access tickets.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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Smartphones do too much: convergence is giving way to divergence

Saad Fazil, Guest Contributor — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 19:00:06 +0000

For years, the holy grail of personal tech has been convergence. Now that we essentially have a version of that in the form of smartphones – which allow fairly sophisticated computing for most daily needs, from accomplishing work to playing music – ironically many of us are discovering the need to extract some of those functions and instead carry multiple devices, such as a smartphone, a tablet, and a smartwatch all at once.

I call this trend divergence; let’s look at a few factors that are driving it.

Increasing complexity

Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of components in integrated circuit chips doubles every 18 months, made it possible to drive more power from a small footprint of electronics. With Moore’s Law on their side and users demanding to carry more with less, entrepreneurs seized the opportunity, and began fitting more functions into a single device, thus paving the way to convergence.

However, as newer functions get bundled into a single device, the interface often (but certainly not always) becomes more complex. Therefore a need arises to extract certain functions in a separate device in a form factor that makes more sense for that function.

As an example, Google Glass is arguably a better form factor to capture a video while taking a roller coaster ride than trying to hold onto your phablet. And a Pebble Watch provides a simpler and easier interface to view and control music while on the go. Ironically, Moore’s Law is also playing a big role in divergence of devices: The ability to fit more power in limited space is crucial for these new form factors to work.

Horizontal solutions

Clayton Christensen explains in the Innovator’s Solution that when interfaces between components aren’t well-defined, vertically integrated products tend to do very well. For instance, the Mac did very well in the early years of personal computing in part because of the tight integration between its hardware and operating system.

Similarly, when Apple introduced the iPhone six years ago, the smartphone industry was still in a relatively early phase. Apple was able to take advantage of a lack of well-defined interfaces by joining together computing, telephony, and music in a vertically integrated device. It would have been extremely hard for a small startup to come up with a converged device like an iPhone at that time: Apple not only had expertise in both software and hardware, it also benefited strongly from its partnerships (music labels, movie studios, app developers large and small) all along the value chain.

Yet, coming on six years from when the first iPhone launched, I believe that the industry has now entered a stage where the tight coupling of mobile hardware and software, while beneficial, is not the only winning strategy. APIs and interfaces such as WiFi, Bluetooth and location platforms are well established, consistent and understood. Therefore smaller independent players such as Fitbit (disclosure: see below) and its many competitors, along with the many smart watches, credit card readers, security beacons coming out every day, can succeed by leveraging these popular interfaces and platforms to deliver new applications that function better on their own.

There’s no doubt that vertically integrated players like Apple will still have some advantages – Apple’s rumored iWatch for one would presumably provide native iOS support to do many things that something like the Pebble Watch cannot do (for example, selectively turn on app notifications; similarly it can only preview emails from Gmail on an Android device).

But thanks to these well-established platforms, we will have no shortage of newer companies venturing into the digital devices arena.

Master of one

Now that smartphones and tablets offer several functions quite satisfactorily, there is an emerging trend to solve very specific problems very well. As Nokia’s Marko Ahtisaari said in an interview with Slashgear, “there’ll be room for more and more dedicated devices that do a few things really well again.” Already Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite remains the device of choice for those who are hardcore e-book readers, especially those who read in sunlight. Users could easily opt to read the same Kindle book on their smartphone or tablet but choose the device that does this one task best.

And I will not be shocked if specialized music players that only stream music from popular services, such as Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and the like start appearing in the market. Of course, feasibility of such devices will also require newer business models that can enable affordable data plans.

While convergence will continue to move forward in certain areas – such as in the home entertainment space, where a single TV will compress several functions offered by separate set-top boxes into one device – newer form factors, horizontal solutions, specialization, and above all human ingenuity will ensure that we never run out of the need to carry multiple devices. At least not until advancements in materials science and technology enable a single device to take multiple forms.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Saad Fazil writes about emerging trends in the high-tech industry, especially in the areas of social, location and mobile. He writes at itval.e. Follow him on Twitter @ sfrocks.

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Meet Homo Erectus Connectus — or, if you prefer, Wearable Man (infographic)

Rani Molla — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:28:58 +0000

If wearable technology wants to break into the mainstream, it has to overcome the geek factor. And that may be tough when King of the Nerds Sergey Brin is touting Google Glass on New York’s subways.

Some companies are actually opting for prominent devices as a way to show off your connectedness, or at least not lose your gadget in the wash. But as batteries get smaller, wearables could become less of a fashion statement and more about a new wave of immersive computing.

Either way, there will be a lot of competition. ABI Research predicts that the global market for wearable computing devices in health and fitness could reach 170 million devices by 2017.

At the end of the day, the design of the wearable and how it feels on your body is only half the battle. Wearable makers are hard at work making sure their gadgets can collect the right data and deliver a service to users that makes the data important and useful in their daily lives. If the body data isn’t helpful, then really, what’s the point?

We created this “bare-bones” infographic of wearable devices that are currently available and that fit the mold for what we see as the future of the connected you: data-driven services, and unobtrusive design. Which ones do you own or want to own? Click on each body section to read more about the companies and devices available.

Google Glass

Google’s “augmented reality” glasses allow you to do anything you’d normally do on your phone or laptop — record video, find directions, message your friends — but without your hands. It’s currently available only to select “creative individuals” in colors Charcoal, Tangerine, Shale, Cotton and Sky and perhaps soon in more attractive styles. ($1,500)

Watches

A number of companies including Motorola, Pebble and Basis Science have all thrown their hats in the connected watch arena. Adding new purpose to a time-warn accessory, these smart watches read texts out loud, play music, and track your exercise and health — in addition to telling time. Apple is even working on a watch that could run iOS. ($115-$300)

Bracelets

Companies like Jawbone and Fitbit are marrying data and design for a wearable computing experience that’s seamless and attractive. Their wristbands and bracelets are being used to track fitness, sleep and calories but look like a simple accessory. ($99-$129)

Jewelry

Sensors are the essential part of all wearable devices. Companies like Misfit and its Shine device use sensors that can also function as jewelry for a seamless way to track your activity. A recent Apple filing shows the company might have even broader ambitions for wearable sensors, too. ($59-$99)

Shoes

Thinkstock

From connected shoes to connected clips and inserts, feet are often the preferred place for activity trackers that show where and how far you’ve run. ($ price varies on technology)

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Amiigo and its exercise database want to make your fitness device look dumb

Derrick Harris — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:35:06 +0000

The fitness-tracking incumbents might want to pay attention to Salt Lake City-based Amiigo. The personal fitness startup’s eponymous device isn’t yet available, but it has generated a lot of buzz and money (almost $300,000 on Indiegogo and an undisclosed amount of venture capital), and it promises to make the Fitbit (see disclosure), Jawbone Up and every other fitness-tracking device look quaint by comparison. The key to its appeal is cleverly using data to deliver a personal experience the others can’t yet touch.

If you’ve read anything about Amiigo since its launch in October, you’ve might have read all about how it places sensors (an accelerometer, skin-temperature sensor and pulse oximeter, to be exact) into a wristband and shoe clip in order to figure out what exercises someone is performing and how well, hard or often he or she is actually doing them. What you might not know is how that process actually works. So I asked co-founder Abe Carter to explain.

All about the database

The core of Amiigo’s promise isn’t actually part of the device at all. Rather, it’s a database full of baseline information, which Amiigo calls reference data, for hundreds of different activities. It turns out, Carter explained, “there’s a generally accepted way that the vast majority of exercises and activities are performed.”

So, when users are out jogging or lifting weights or rowing, let’s say, Amiigo is clocking the motions they’re making and how often they’re making them. When they open the Amiigo app, they’ll not only be spared the hassle of entering data on what activity they just performed and how long they did it, they’ll actually be greeted with all that information and more. If you’re lifting weights, Carter explained, Amiigo will know that you were doing squats and therefore burned a whole lot of calories (even though you might have taken just a few steps), as well as how hard you were working, how many reps and how long you took resting in between sets.

But more importantly, Amiigo’s database grows smarter as users teach it about a variety of new activities. Initially, the app will still rely on reference activities with similar profiles (swimming, for example, instead of my homemade activity of laying on my belly and thrashing my arms and legs) in order to gauge intensity and calories burned, but it will eventually come to recognize the unique characteristics of the new activity, too. It’s all a matter of time and data: “You don’t know exactly with a sample of one how well that person was performing that activity,” Carter explained.

Better personal data helps everyone

Over time, all of this data lets users track at a very granular level their performance in specific activities rather than just how many times they’ve done it and for how long each session. Furthermore, it helps eliminate an innate desire to cheat the system — and the social competition features of almost all fitness-tracking platforms — by entering false information. Carter says social workouts have proven to be more effective than working out alone because of the motivation factor, but some jerk claiming he’s doing 2-minute miles can upset whole game dynamic when the socialization is merely virtual.

Going forward, Carter said Amiigo has plans to use all the data it’s collecting for bigger and better things than just personal data. He mentioned building analytics tools atop the aggregate data from users, or using it to help spot the early onset of certain diseases. These could include, for example, tracking changes in motion to identify Parkinson’s disease (already the subject of a study using voice data from phone calls) or, presumably, tracking changes in cardiovascular data to identify heart disease.

All of Amiigo’s promises are just theoretical, of course — it still needs to collect all that user data and prove it works when the devices are finally available — but they do point in the direction that I think the personal health field needs to take. As I’ve explained before (as has my colleague Stacey Higginbotham), all the connected devices and personal data in the world are of relatively little use if they’re not easy to use and tied to a service that’s actually valuable. And while Fitbit, Jawbone Up and other fitness trackers have certainly pioneered a hot new field, they’re still relatively limited in what they can track and the data they present, all the while requiring a fair amount of legwork from users.

I don’t suspect Amiigo will render all other fitness devices obsolete, but it should give them something to think about.

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GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:01:14 +0000

Every January CES sets the stage for the next year in tech, showing off all the latest in consumer electronics as well as smart-home technology, digital health, connected cars, virtual reality, and mobile platforms. Given how CES is now a barometer for such a wide array of technology segments, we at GigaOM Research decided to ask our readers which way the tech winds will blow over the next year based on what they saw in Las Vegas. Our readers responded with the technologies they thought were the most disruptive and least disruptive, as well as the companies they were most impressed with, from categories as diverse as TV technology, smart home, connected car, internet of things, virtual or augmented reality, 3D printing, interfaces, digital health, mobility, and robotics.

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How batteries affect wearable design: 1st Google Glass had battery backpack

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 06:04:06 +0000

The battery is one of the biggest inhibitors to designing the shape and weight of wearables. If you ever forget that, just go back and look at the very first prototype of Google Glass, Google’s digital, multi-media glasses project in a photo taken by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson. In addition to making you look like a Borg, you can see the first prototype’s got a backpack attached to it that Jurvetson says was full of batteries to power the device.

In the above photo, Google X’s Sarah Price is showing off the original prototype in a slide while sporting the current model, which is way more refined, has a much smaller battery and can still power the glasses for a day. The next prototype — but still an early version — is below.

And finally the current version below that you can see Googlers sporting around the campus and elsewhere (I saw a pair in the wild at a Mission pub this weekend).

Top two photos courtesy of Jurvetson, creative commons. Bottom photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk.

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A new battery that could revolutionize wearables

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 08:00:22 +0000

Picture a Nike FuelBand that’s just a small ring on your index finger, or a cell phone that’s as slim and pliable as a credit card. Those types of thin, tiny or just down right unusual shapes could be created if there were batteries that were both slim, flexible and also powerful enough to run the gadgets. It’s the batteries, it turns out, that are the main barrier to modern electronics design.

But in a small, brightly-lit lab in an office park behind the Oakland Airport in Alameda, Calif., a young startup called Imprint Energy, is using research created at the University of California, Berkeley to develop just such a battery that could free gadget makers from the constraints of the standard lithium ion battery. Well, that’s the plan anyways.

Using zinc, instead of lithium, and screen printing technology, Imprint Energy is already churning out low volumes of its ultra-thin, energy-dense, flexible, and low cost rechargeable batteries for pilot customers.

The battery barrier

The problem is, it’s hard to make standard lithium ion batteries thin and flexible, explained Imprint Energy CEO Devin MacKenzie to me in an interview in the startup’s lab last week. There’s a “lot of packaging,” required to seal off the highly reactive lithium in the battery from the environment, said MacKenzie. If you’ve ever seen YouTube videos of lithium batteries that catch on fire in the air or water, you know why those barriers are needed.

But this architecture also makes lithium ion batteries rigid and potentially bulky. Even the slimmest laptops like the Macbook Air, or tablets like the iPad, faced design limitations created by the size and weight of the batteries. The Nike FuelBand uses a curved (called conformal in battery terms) lithium polymer battery, but if you look closely at the shape of the band (photo left), the battery is the only part of the bracelet that isn’t pliable.

Upsides of zinc

Imprint Energy’s battery tackles the problem of rigidity and bulkiness by simply throwing out the lithium. The company, which now has a staff of 8, was founded in 2010 by U.C. Berkeley PHD students Christine Ho and Brooks Kincaid, and more they recently raised seed funding from Dow Chemical and CIA fund In-Q-Tel.

The company uses zinc for the anode part of the battery, and combines that with a solid polymer electrolyte and a cathode made of a metal oxide. A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between — zinc ions (in Imprint’s case) travel from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte, creating a chemical reaction that allows electrons to be harvested along the way.

MacKenzie tells me that while zinc has been used for years in batteries, it’s been difficult to make zinc batteries rechargeable. That’s because when zinc is combined with a liquid electrolyte it creates something called dendrites, which are tiny fibers that grow and get in the way of the charging reaction. Imprint Energy solved this hurdle by using an electrolyte made of a solid polymer combined with the zinc.

Using zinc means Imprint’s batteries can have far less “packaging” because zinc isn’t highly reactive with the environment. In other words, the batteries can be made much more thinly. They can also be made as tiny as a few hundred microns thick (the width of a couple human hairs). Batteries that small could power tiny digital smart labels, like freshness detector stickers on food.

Zinc also makes Imprint’s batteries more safe and less toxic than lithium-based batteries. The team at Imprint can work on the zinc batteries in the open air. And the zinc batteries are a safer option for creating devices that sit on — or even in — the body. Imagine a lithium battery powering a heart device inside a person’s chest cavity, and the battery leaks lithium into the person’s body. Yikes.

Printable batteries

The other innovation that Imprint Energy has developed is that it’s printing out its batteries using standard screen printing technology. Most batteries are made by coating the materials onto foils, which are then assembled into cells.

In Imprint Energy’s Alameda lab, CEO MacKenzie shows me one of two battery printing machines on site and a variety of screens that look sort of like t-shirt silk screening screens. The battery materials are printed like ink onto the screens in whatever shapes the client requires. Customers will pay a premium for batteries created to the custom shapes of their devices.

The company can churn out 100 cells a day on the machines in its lab. That’s tiny in the world of the battery giants in Asia, but it’s large enough to get samples out to potential customers. Down the road — potentially two to three years — the company will scale up manufacturing to a large commercial scale, but it won’t likely be building its own factories. More likely, it will work closely with manufacturing partners or license its technology.

An eye on wearables

While it’s still early days for Imprint Energy, the team’s end goal is the wearable electronics market, both for consumers (like Nike’s FuelBand and the FitBit line) as well as the health sector (such as implanted monitors). The wearables industry could reap the most benefits from the novel and thin shapes of the batteries, as well as the safe and less toxic materials.

Co-founder Kincaid is a wearables buff. He shows me his own Nike FuelBand on his wrist during the interview, and he says he’s eagerly awaiting the arrival of his Misfit Shine. For the wearables industry, Imprint Energy’s zinc poly batteries could enable an entirely new type of device that’s more hidden, more streamlined, or more functional. Given that wearable electronics is an emerging sector, and one that could become a lot more mainstream over the next few years, disruptive design could ultimately completely change the wearable industry.

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