Fitness trackers have hit something of a ceiling in what they can glean from your vitals.
Some like the Fitbit Charge HR and the Microsoft Band can monitor a user's heart rate throughout the day, continuously -- an impressive insight, but it's about as far as the tech goes right now.
Wearables can’t see what’s going on inside your bloodstream.
Echo Labs, a small startup from the Stanford-affiliated Start X incubator, may be among the first to take health monitoring to the next level.
Their prototype wristband, two years in the making, can measure oxygen, CO2, PH, hydration and blood pressure levels in the blood, by using optical signals.
You can be sure that Jawbone, Fitbit and Apple’s Watch team are working on getting similar insights under the skin. Yet Echo Labs is among the first to go public with the details of its own working prototype, a (for now) clunky-looking band that’s packed with sensors.
While it’s not ready for the market yet, founders Pierre-Jean Cobut 32, and Elad Ferber 29 have already been fielding enquiries from companies in pharma, biotech, medtech, insurance and even car manufacturers, most of whom are keen on the ability to continuously monitor blood composition.
Cobut and Ferber had originally intended to pitch their product directly to consumers, but theirs is a team of three, and it's hard to see them releasing a consumer product any time soon. It may be more likely that their technology winds up on other existing health devices.
Their wristband works by measuring blood content with light and a proprietary algorithm. In simple terms, it shines electromagnetic waves through human tissue, then measures the reflection of varying light frequencies to detect the concentration of molecules in the blood.
“Any molecule gives a response to a frequency in light,” says Echo Labs co-founder Cobut. “If you know what the frequency is, you can detect the molecule. The lower the concentration of the molecule, the harder it is to pick up.”
A molecule of oxygen and a molecule of CO2 will have a different profile, and reflect back a different frequency. “Every molecule has a light signature.”
The idea of using optics to measure blood content is nothing new.
A pulse oximeter for instance, the device that hospitals and doctor’s offices will inexplicably clip onto your finger when you pay them a visit, uses an LED light to measure oxygen levels in the blood. The red light it transmits travels through the blood differently, depending on how saturated it is with oxygen.
One of the main challenges with using optics to measure blood composition is noise. Walk around with a pulse oximeter on your finger and it will stop working. The "noise" is actually external light, movement, body hair or skin color.
Plenty of companies have tried to address the noise problem using optics and lasers, especially in pursuit of that Holy Grail of vitals: glucose levels.
Not only would that be a major boon for diabetes sufferers and those at risk of diabetes, it could be a historic step towards passively tracking what people eat.
But so far no company has managed to bring a product to market that can non-invasively (without the use of a needle) measure glucose levels.
The Echo Labs dashboard being used during a trial at a hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. (Photo via Echo... [+]
Even Apple has tried cracking the problem. In late 2013 it hired a number of engineers and scientists from C8 Medisensors, a now-shuttered California company whose sole focus was creating a non-invasive glucose monitoring device called HG1-c.
Yoni Heisler of Network World has written a compelling thesis on why Apple struggled to integrate that company’s technology into the Apple Watch. In a nutshell, the tech was too big to fit into a watch, and the device’s camera sensor needed to be cloaked in darkness to pick up the signals from glucose molecules, which would never work on the wrist.
C8 struggled to create algorithms that could help its software cut through the noise from ambient light, and Apple was unable to include a glucose monitor into its first iteration of the Watch.
Echo Labs’ Ferber says his algorithm is robust enough to continuously measure blood composition whether a wearer is running or sitting at a desk. He also thinks his team could crack the glucose problem in a few years' time. Cobut describes their algorithm as “really complicated math and physics that cleans the signal.”
Cobut and Ferber founded their company in 2012 after meeting at Stanford business school. They believed back then (and still do today) that wearable devices weren’t all that insightful. You can sort of see why. The flagship feature for most wearables is still to track steps.
“We wanted to provide users with real insights with things that they can act on,” says Cobut. “We had to start by measuring data that’s insightful in nature.” Packaging that technology in a wearable that's both comfortable and accurate though, is his next big challenge.
