At CES in January, Samsung showed off a concept for a smart belt called Welt (a portmanteau of wellness and belt). At the beginning of the summer, the company announced that the Welt team had spun off into its own startup. Now Welt has brought its device to crowdfunding website Kickstarter, where it proved an overnight success, raising $64,485 over the long weekend.
Welt comes from Samsung...
King's Health Partners, an academic science center, and health wearable company Buddi, both UK-based, are testing a combination of a wearable device and a mobile app to help keep at-risk patients from developing Type 2 diabetes. The randomized control trial, which starts next month, will follow 200 patients with prediabetes over the course of a year in the London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark...
Jawbone is selling its speaker business and may also be halting sales of its wearable tracker line, according to various reports. Another report says these efforts will be followed up by the launch of a device in a new category: a clinical-grade health wearable. (Updated below with a statement from Jawbone.)
Fortune reported on the sale of the speaker business on Friday. According to Fortune,...
Fitbit Surge
Fitbit has added a new functionality to its Fitbit Charge HR and Fitbit Surge trackers that will enable the device to readily distinguish between different kinds of movement, and has also upgraded the heart rate sensors in the trackers.
The automatic exercise recognition feature, called SmartTrack, will be automatically pushed out to current users of the two devices in an update. ...
Campbell, California-based TuringSense has raised $3 million in seed funding. The company is currently developing a wearable sensor for tennis players, but has plans to expand int other sports and eventually into the healthcare market.
Five investors contributed to the round: Angel Plus, ChinaRock Capital, Ideosource, SV Tech Ventures and Zen Water Capital, in addition to some angel investors....
Whoop, a Boston-based wearable company working on a device for athletes, announced an additional $12 million in funding as it prepares to officially launch its Whoop Strap device and performance optimization system. Two Sigma Ventures led the round. Mousse Partners, Accomplice, Promus Ventures, Valley Oak Investments, and NextView Ventures also participated. This brings the company's total...
Runtastic, the Austrian fitness app company that was recently acquired by Adidas, announced its second wearable fitness tracker, the Runtastic Moment. The Moment, which has both a watch and fitness tracking capabilities, is a follow-up to the Runtastic Orbit wearable launched last summer.
“Over the past few years, we have seen the majority of players in the health and fitness space – Runtastic...
Google (specifically the life sciences team at Google X) is building a wearable health sensor for cardiac and activity tracking, but it isn't a Fitbit or Apple Watch competitor: Google's device is a clinical-grade sensor designed for investigational use.
"In brief, we’ll be starting to use it in clinical studies to see if/how a continuous stream of medical-grade measurements of biological signals...
Sixty seven percent of seniors want to access healthcare service from home, although 66 percent of seniors do not think current available technology is sufficient for them to do so, according to an Accenture survey of 354 US seniors, aged 65 and over who are receiving Medicare benefits. The survey was fielded between May and June 2014.
Accenture pointed out that according to data from the US...
Samsung's Gear Fit.
With the Apple Watch launch, and its potential to upend the wearables market, a few months away, Canalys reports that the current market leader for "smart wearable bands" -- any wristworn device that can run third-party applications -- is Samsung. Meanwhile, the "basic wearable band" market, which Canalys defines as wearables that can't run apps, is still led by Fitbit.
The...
