Hasta La Gadget!

LG’s Life Band Touch is a fitness tracker that offers smartwatch features, including incoming call notifications and display. It uses Bluetooth LE, and works with both Android and iOS devices. There are controls on the device that let you switch tracks, play and pause music and more.

For fitness tracking, the Life Band Touch can report steps taken, distance travelled, pace and even calories burned. It has a built-in LED display to let you keep track of all that data without activating your phone, and it’s water resistant. It can work with existing fitness applications, too, so developers can integrate it into their own offering.

The Life Band Touch is launching this spring in the U.S., along with the Heart Rate Earphones, which use an optical sensor to measure the blood flow to your ears to determine your heart rate, and add that data to the information collected by the Life Band Touch itself.

Withings has unveiled a new active sleep system device at CES 2014. The device promises to help the user track their sleep patterns and wake up and fall asleep faster … Continue reading

At CES 2014, Withings was showing off the latest product in its lineup of home health tracking connected gadgets, the Aura. The Aura looks vaguely like a submarine’s periscope, but it lives on your nightstand, connects to a sensor pad that goes under your mattress, and provides super sophisticated sleep tracking along with intelligent wake up and sleep sequences to give you your best possible rest.

The Aura is a wake-up like, not unlike other products on the market from companies including Philips, but it uses light combined with sound to help trigger melatonin release, which the company says happens via scientifically sound processes. These are triggered variously to relax you at night, or wake you up in the morning, using different tones from the LED light in the nightstand component, which also doubles as an alarm clock and speaker.

The Aura connects to a pad of sensors via cable, providing power and collecting data from said attachment. This pad picks up “micromovements” according to Withings, which are far more subtle than the kind of tossing and turning detectable by most wrist- and pocket-borne activity trackers, including Withings’ own Pulse. The sensor can detect small movements from under a pillow-top or even a tempurpedic mattress (which are designed to minimize the effect of movement), and up to two can be used to monitor sleep patterns for two people in the same bed. It can detect not only movements, but also breathing cycles and heart rate to arrive at much more sophisticated conclusions about that nature and quality of your sleep. Using this data, it can help the Aura alarm unit start to wake you up more gently when it makes sense, rather than abruptly right at a specific time.

These can be used in combination with Withings’ existing suite of health products to provide a more complete picture through their smartphone app, the company says. It’s aiming to ship the Aura starting in spring, 2014 and the whole kit, including one sensor pad and one nightstand alarm/light will cost $299. That’s steep compared to the Philips wake-up light at $99, but Withings is essentially the first to combine that product with highly sophisticated sleep tracking. Still, you have to be very committed to the self-monitored health movement to make that leap, I’d imagine.

Raise your hand if you kept all of your New Year’s resolutions in 2013. Good, okay, now only raise your hand if you weren’t lying just now. Ahh, nice to see both of you. We always start the new year with the best intentions but, man, old habits die hard. Let’s see if we can do better this year. Here are five tips that might just help.

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If you’re a health buff or if you have food allergies, you probably have a mental list of edibles to avoid. But how can you be sure that the food that’s in front of you is up to your standards? That’s the idea behind TellSpec. It’s a small scanner that can supposedly tell you what’s in your food.

TellSpec has two primary parts: a low-power laser and a spectrometer. Simply put, substances in food reflect light from the laser in distinct ways. The spectrometer analyzes and records the reflections, then TellSpec sends this data online using your mobile device. The results are displayed on your device as well via an app. TellSpec can identify the amount of calories and sugar on the scanned item, as well as the presence of preservatives and allergens such as nuts and gluten. It can scan through plastic and glass so you can use it while buying or browsing food.

TellSpec’s app can do more than just identify ingredients. It can also keep track of your calorie intake and even help you self-diagnose if you’re allergic to a particular substance. Here’s a demo of a very early prototype of the TellSpec:

Looks like they’ve got a long to go to get the device down to size. But if you’re willing to take the gamble, you can pre-order TellSpec online for $320 (USD). There are also pre-order bundles for family use and for developers. Because it uses a cloud service, TellSpec will also require a subscription. When you buy the device, you get one year of free service but after that you need to pay either $7 a month or $70 a year for it to keep working. Check out TellSpec’s website or their Indiegogo campaign page for more info.

[via The Red Ferret Journal]