Hasta La Gadget!

New Kickstarter project Trace is like a Fitbit for your extreme sports needs, allowing people who skate, surf, snowboard and ski to track a lot more than just time, distance and pace while participating in the sport they love. The Trace is the latest from ActiveReplay, a company that created AlpineReplay, an app and network for skiers to track and share their stats on the mountain.

Both AlpineReplay and the Trace are the brainchildren of Dr. Anatole Loshkin, one of the founders of GPS company Magellan, and his team of seven engineers based out of Hunting Beach, CA. The waterproof and shockproof Trace is a small cylinder, roughly the size of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, which can affix to your board using a separate mount (and it’s detachable so that you can use it on multiple boards in multiple sports).

It’s designed to gather data including speed, distance, jump height and rotation, and has specialized free apps on iOS and Android for surf, skate and snow sports. The apps not only collect your data and give you a history you can check at any time, but add in a social element, allowing you to share that info with other athletes in your field. Through repeated use, ActiveReplay says they’ll be identify more and more tricks, letting them know exactly when a user lands a kickflip, for instance, or a 360, etc.

I spoke to ActiveReplay VP of Products David Loshkin, who himself has a background in applied mathematics from Harvard and has been writing a lot of the code for ActiveReplay, and whose personal interest in and passion for surfing, skating and snowboarding drove a lot of the product direction for ActiveReplay.

“If you’re a biker or a hardcore runner you have all these really cool gadgets to tell you your mile splits, heart rate and so forth,” he said. “I grew up skiing and snowboarding, and surfing and skating, and none of this exists for those sports, even though I think the information is way cooler. You’re doing complicated tricks where the board is spinning in all sorts of directions around you, you’re getting air time, you’re not just going in a straight line. This is a product I’ve always wanted, and there’s no reason at this point why surfing can’t be measured, why I can’t know how many waves I’ve caught for the year, for the month, or for just that session.”

The Trace is definitely cool, but is it something that can scale? Action sports are already more limited in appeal than general fitness activities like biking and run, after all, and only a small portion of people who participate in those sports track their activity with a dedicated device. But Loshkin argues that there’s a very big market for Trace, and notes that huge brands like Red Bull and ABC invest a lot in action sports, and they make up a good chunk of marquee broadcast events like the Winter Olympics.

“There are two sides: There’s the athlete’s side, and we feel that this is definitely going to change everything for surfers and skaters and stuff, but there’s also that spectator side,” he said. “When Tony Hawk says that he did a tre flip for example, my friends don’t know what a tre flip is, but that trick could instantly populate on the screen and you could instantly know that that’s one rotation in the x-axis and one rotation in the y-axis, and we could show that with cool graphics.”

The ActiveReplay Trace campaign is seeking $150,000 to get the device to mass production-ready state, with funding set to close in September and a ship date of January for the first batch of devices. The Trace starts at $99 for an early-bird pledge, and the company is being smart and staging batches so that they only have to manage fairly small volume shipments with each. Dr. Anatole Loshkin has lots of experience shipping hardware at Magellan, and clearly knows that promising too much too quickly is a pitfall to be avoided with hardware startups.

As a former (very) amateur skateboarder, I’m very interested in the kind of data the Trace can gather and report. Action sports may have a smaller user base than more broad activities like running, but it’s not as small as you might think, and it’s also a much more dedicated and invested group, so something like this makes a lot of logical sense for that market.

And the battle to build quantified self gadgets rages on. The newest entrant is one that isn’t exactly new to the space — Withings has been churning out smart scales and body analyzers since 2009, but it recently decided to set it sights on Fitbit and Jawbone with a new, $99 wearable fitness tracker called the Pulse.

The particulars should sound familiar: the Pulse is a tiny (it weighs in at 8 grams) thing with a touch-sensitive OLED display that’s worn on your person and measures the steps you’ve taken, calories you’ve burned, and how long you’ve slept. Oh, and to top it off, you can press your finger to the Pulse’s rear end to figure out your heart rate. Neat trick.

Familiar though that formula may be, Withings brings something rather neat to the table though: a hardware ecosystem (if a small one). The company’s background in smart scales means it’s capable of adding some crucial context to the activity data the Pulse is able to collect — a more accurate picture of a person’s fitness level and the effect it actually has on the body. Media darling Fitbit has so far struck to a similar strategy, albeit one that ran in reverse — the company spent years honing its Fitbit wearables before releasing the Aria scale in 2012.

That said, Withings is no stranger to cooperation with other quantified self players either. Companies like Fitbit and Jawbone have made it a point to partner with Withings so they can incorporate weight data into users’ accounts. It’s a natural fit considering that a person’s weight represents a crucial bit of information that those company’s respective gadgets can’t really figure out on their own.

Honestly though, for a company that’s been nothing if not eager to add value to other wearable gadgets, it’s a little strange to see Withings take a shot at the market themselves. These days it seems like nearly every fitness-focused company is trying reinvent to the pedometer, but it takes some serious expertise to turn a pint-sized selection of sensors and components into a product worth using. The development process may have been a bumpy one too — Withings first showed off that activity tracker (encased in Plexiglass no less) back in Las Vegas at CES 2013, and here we are about five months later with only the option to pre-order the thing.

For all the question marks that come with the Pulse, Withings may actually be onto something here. If the company can nail the experience of aggregating data across its hardware lineup and feeding it all into its accompanying app (not to mention the 100 or so partner apps floating around out there), Withings may just be able to pull ahead of a sizable pack.

One of the early pioneers in the Quantified Self movement has quietly gone out of business. Zeo, a leading maker of hardware and software used by consumers to track sleep and improve their health, has not been operating since the end of last year. A trustee has nearly completed the sale of all company assets. Zeo has been very quiet about the news up until now. In fact, Zeo’s website is still up and doesn’t mention the news.

Zeo was founded by three students at Brown University who had a passion for using the science of sleep and technology to improve people’s lives. The company introduced its first product, the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, in June 2009.

The following week, the first article mentioning the term “Quantified Self” was published in Wired magazine. While the article didn’t mention Zeo, it did claim “a new culture of personal data was taking shape.” And that every facet of life from sleep to mood to pain was becoming trackable. “Even sleep – a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you’re unconscious – is yielding to the skill of the widget maker.”

In 2011, the widget maker Zeo introduced a mobile version to its Sleep Manager product line. By wearing a special headband, with sensors to measure electrical current, the Zeo could track different phases of sleep, such as Light, Deep and REM sleep, in addition to awake time. This data was then sent to an iPhone, iPod, or Android phone, and could be automatically uploaded to a personal and private online sleep database. This data along with some analytical tools could then be used to help improve your sleep and health.

What Went Wrong

Former CEO, Dave Dickinson, who lead the company for the past 5 years, tells TechCrunch the problem was not the brand or the product. In fact, the company was growing before it shut down.

Dickinson says the problem was the business model. “The business model is more important than the brand. Consumer health devices are a very capital-intensive business. You have to find enough money to address the consumer, funds to address the physicians, and also the retailers, and that’s up and above the device business having to fund inventory.”

Zeo had two business model options on the revenue side. Become a SAAS-like business with subscriptions and recurring revenue or make enough money from a customer who bought just one unit. But that was very difficult when the company started pricing its mobile product at $99, with ‘sub-optimal’ profit margins.

The Newton, Massachusetts-based company had raised more than $30 million over eight years. Dickinson says raising capital was not the problem.

Sleep Tracking As A Commodity

Another problem for Zeo was that sleep tracking became a commodity. Devices like the FitBit, lark, and Jawbone Up use an accelerometer to determine sleep and awake cycles, using wrist actigraphy. These products brand their products as sleep trackers just like Zeo.

Dickinson says Zeo had peer-reviewed scientific studies, including one published in the Journal of Sleep Research, showing his technology was 7/8th as accurate as data from the a sleep lab, considered to be the gold standard for measuring sleep. The study also says data from wrist actigraphy to measure tiny motions in devices are much less accurate. But that didn’t seem to matter for enough consumers.

The Competition

Dickinson says he admires what the Fitbit and others like it have done. Those devices are not limited to one health issue like sleep, which was another problem for Zeo. Those other products work for different health and wellness areas, such as the well established desire to lose weight and become physically fit. Consumers already spend billions of dollars to achieve those goals. And they are already educated and motivated to improve their weight and fitness.

Part of Zeo’s business model required it to educate the consumer on the importance of sleep and how sleep awareness and data can improve your health. Arianna Huffington, Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post, our AOL sister site, has been a crusader on the importance of sleep to your health. But according to Dickinson, “sleep is still lagging behind as important to your wellness. So in that respect, Zeo was early in terms of its mission.”

The Product

I used the device for several months last year and thought it was amazing. While wearing the headband took some getting used to, for me and my wife, the data it revealed was eye-popping. In addition to learning that I wasn’t getting enough sleep, which I knew already, I learned about the different types of sleep I was getting.

Most nights, I would get a half hour to an hour of “Deep Sleep” (dark green in the chart below) after going to bed. This is the phase of sleep the helps you feel restored and refreshed.

I would also see several periods of REM sleep, important for overall mental health, mood, and the ability to retain knowledge. The bulk of my time asleep, like most people, was spent in “Light Sleep,” which is better than not sleeping but doesn’t do as much for my health as Deep or REM sleep.

I was able to see graphics like this on my iPhone in the morning.

Here’s a good night with a sleep score of 90 out of 100 and more than 8 hours of sleep.

And here’s a bad night, with a score of 47 with just 4 and a half hours of total sleep.

If I woke up in the morning during REM sleep, it was hard to get out of bed. If I didn’t get enough Deep Sleep, I didn’t feel I had a good night sleep.

Zeo claimed the real value of the program was I could get personalized online sleep coaching. But this required logging in to the website and entering more information about my sleep and other variables I wanted to track. If I could have entered the data right on my iPhone, I would have likely used it more. Since it required logging in on the website, it proved too much friction for me.

I also stopped wearing the headband after a while because it does feel a bit awkward. The former CEO says the company was aware the device was too invasive for some customers.

But if a less invasive sensor was made and it was easier to enter custom data and get actionable information, I would have used it every night.

What’s Next

Dickinson can’t comment on exactly what’s next for Zeo, after all the assets are sold. But he is hopeful that there may be an opportunity for the company to re-emerge in the future.

An article appeared in the MobiHealthNews in March, that reported the Better Business Bureau had listed Zeo as being “out of business” but with no official announcement by the company, the news hasn’t been widely known.

It is still possible to log-in to Zeo’s “My Sleep” site that contains your sleep data. An article on the Quantified Self website today tells users how they can download their data in case the site goes offline.

As word about Zeo’s status has spread, Dickinson says they have received tremendous support and inquires from all over the world from disappointed customers and sleep researchers who had planned to use the units for the research.

He wrote a post on the MobiHealthNews site last week that included some additional lessons learned. He concluded by writing “motivating behavioral change through data visualization can be very powerful, but it is more of an art than a science. We will need far more artists, user interface experts and psychologists to help make our data work harder to motivate better health.”

The world is becoming increasingly populated with robots, and consumers are eating it up. Now, the latest robot to hit the market will help you keep your calories down in the process. PCH International, the company that teams with startups and bigger brands to help manufacture and distribute hardware products, has announced its latest project: a partnership with Intuitive Automata to develop Autom, a $199 “healthcare robot coach” designed to help people lose weight.

Autom, as the robot is called, is designed as a personal lifestyle coach: it takes in data about the person who owns it and gradually adapts its responses to keep you on track. “The more it learns about the individual user, the more it customizes the feedback advice to keep the individual motivated,” the companies said in a statement.

The idea here is that although there are dozens of apps and some hardware on the market today designed to help people stay healthy and eat well — a product of the big interest in “quantified self” technology — having a physical presence sitting in your kitchen, which is learning about and responding to what you do in there, will be a more effective, engaging and fun way of approaching the challenge of losing weight and eating healthy. Intuitive says that this is based on actual research that indicates that robots “create a more powerful and long-lasting relationship with the user than a mobile phone app or a computer.” On top of the $199 price, monthly subscriptions to use the service begin at $19 per user.

Autom looks to be around a foot tall, and in addition to her own active belly, she has a set of eyes that follow you around the room and can blink and wink for extra effect. Watchful eyes in particular seem apt for a robot helping you watch what you eat.

As for the belly, it acts as a kind of dashboard for your food intake, where you can input what you eat, track how many calories you have consumed, and figure out what you need to do to keep yourself in line (that’s the part that presumably shows off how well Autom is getting to know you). Autom talks to you to offer suggestions in an unflappably calm female voice.

The news was announced today by PCH on stage at the Dublin Web Summit. PCH is headquartered in Ireland and manufactures its products in China. Other notable deals PCH has made include a partnership with LittleBits in July to produce the company’s LEGO-style electronic modelling pieces as part of a mass-market push for the hardware company founded by Ayah Bdeir, a TED Fellow and MIT Media Lab alum. In June, PCH also purchased its own design studio Lime Lab to get further involved in the design and production process.

Robots and robotics have had a major boost, with crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter giving inventors a new platform for raising funds and attention for their big ideas. And people who are better known for their software prowess are also investing in robotics. LittleBits is backed by True Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Foundry Group, which has recently raised a $225 million fund, invests in Modular Robots.

And Dmitry Grishin, the CEO of Mail.ru, has his own robotics investment: Grishin Robotics, which recently made its first investment, $225,000 into Double Robotics, a TC Disrupt Hardware Alley finalist.

“The important thing to look at the hardware and robotics business is that everyone knows you can start a software company with two or three engineers, but now the same goes for hardware and robotics companies,” Grishin said earlier today on stage at the Web Summit.

PCH says that the intention is to produce Autom on a mass scale “to help [Intuitive] cater for huge consumer demand.” A spokesperson for the company says that they are not yet disclosing when it will become available confirmed delivery will be in Q2 2013 at the latest. But here you can see a larger-than-life version on stage from earlier today. Below is the actual size as it will appear on your kitchen counter.

Autom is being developed as part of the PCH Accelerator program, which helps hardware startups bring smart ideas to market.

“We have been exploring the new consumer robotics market and have found a perfect opportunity in helping Intuitive Automata scale and bring Autom to market,” said Liam Casey, CEO of PCH International, in a statement today. “Dr. Cory Kidd, founder and CEO of Intuitive, has the vision and energy to make Autom a common device in every home and we are delighted to partner with him to make his vision a reality.”

There’s also a demo video below to show off more of her features.

(main photo credit via)