Forget wearables, the fitness trackers of the future will be ingestible
Ever wondered if your Fitbit would be more useful if you, say, swallowed it? OK, us either, but according to reports by Business Insider, Jawbone is developing a new fitness tracker that will be taken like a pill.
Speaking at the Code/Mobile conference recently, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said one of the biggest problems with wearables currently on the market is the whole “wearable” part.
“The first thing you have to crack though is actually getting people to wear it,“ Rahman said at the conference. “If you can keep it on all the time, the amount of information you get about the user is staggering,” but failing this, the opposite is also true.
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Rahman went on to explain that wearables only track a fraction of people’s health – typically steps, sleep and heart rate, but that there are many other factors to a persons health that aren’t being captured. He claims his company has a vision for a pill with sensors that could “pass through you” and tell you more about what’s happening in your body.
“I can tell if you’re in a car and your blood alcohol content is too high, and I can say, shut off the car,” Rahman said.
And Jawbone isn’t the only company thinking along these lines.
Last year, Fortune reported that Google was working on an ingestible that would be able to scan cells for illnesses like cancer. Similarly, in July the FDA approved an sensor called Proteus, which keeps track of when you take your medication. “When used with a medication, the Proteus Ingestible Sensor marks actual intake time, a quantifiable event that has allowed regulators to grant the expanded indication to the company.”
While some have voiced concern over where we’re left in terms of privacy with all of this data being (literally) pulled from our internal system, it’s definitely an interesting approach to determining just how fit or healthy we may actually be.
How do you feel about ingestible trackers? Let us know by tweeting @YahooStyleCA.
