Withings Aura – smart sleep system

bande1Withings is really taking sleep tracking to the extreme, with the new Aura system (shipping in Spring 2014).  Pads under your mattress detect body movements to help determine sleep quality, and a bedside device records environmental conditions (noise, light, temperature), as well as producing light and sound patterns to either help you sleep, or help wake you gradually.  It’s such a departure from peoples’ normal lives that I expect it’ll be slow to be adopted, but does offer an easy way for technology to influence how we spend a third of our lives.

Read more at TechCrunch or Withing’s website.

New activity trackers unveiled at CES

Garmin-vivofit-820x420As expected, CES saw a bunch of new activity trackers announced, all of which should be for sale later this spring.  First up is the Garmin Vivofit, pictured here, offering a curved always-on display and the usual step and sleep tracking functions.  One different feature is adaptive goals, where once you hit a milestone, the goal for the next day is adjusted upwards to keep pushing you.  Nice idea, but not so good for someone like me who runs five days a week and wants some rest days in between.  I also don’t like the fact that it doesn’t have a rechargeable battery.   While the disposable batteries are said to last around a year, it’s still wasteful.

wellograph-ledeNext up is the Wellograph, watch-like activity tracker that also includes a heartrate monitor.  Unlike the Withings Pulse‘s heartrate monitor though, it appears this can monitor that data closer to real-time.  It’s pricey at around $300 but does offer features in a form factor that’s different than the usual bracelet styles.

basis_b1Similar to the Wellograph, though, is the Basis B1, shown here, that monitors heartrate but also attempts to identify phases of sleep (light, deep, REM).  It’s cheaper too ($200) and in my opinion, looks nicer.

 

 

ifitiFit showed off it’s iFit Active band (also available in clip-on form, see link above), which promises to work with internet connected gym fitness equipment to help you track those activities.  Of course, it also tracks steps and sleep, syncing the data to your smartphone.

LG’s Lifeband Touch is another me-too product, tracking activity etc in a bracelet-like form factor looking a lot like the Nike Fuelband.

motherLast up is Mother from Sen.se…a product that bridges the connected self with the connected home.  A central base station communicates with ‘cookies’ that detect location, movement, and temperature.  In a sense, it’s like the activity trackers, in that each cookie can track steps taken and sleep, but it seems like there’s a lot of potential on the software side of things when a whole family of activity trackers is communicating with a central base station.  When that base station can be programmed to send notifications or other actions based upon events, it could get interesting.  What’s not clear to me is how useful the cookies would be if scattered throughout the house in stationary locations…there’s potentially a lot of data that could be collected this way.  Imagine for example, if ‘Mother’ knows there is a person nearby a stationary cookie…and can see that cookie is reporting a low temperature…can it be programmed to interface with a Nest thermostat to turn up the heat in the house?  Or if all the ‘person’ cookies are on one floor, turn down the heat to the other floors?  Since cookies can communicate with other cookies, it does raise the potential of a very smart house…but this is heavily software-dependent so is theoretically possible, but also very easy to make it complicated and of limited use.  Looks really promising though.

The ILIAD Project – crowdsourcing antibiotic research

The ILIAD Project is launching what they describe as the first “Massively Multi-Scientist Open Experiment (MMOW)”, whereby participants will perform experiments at home in an attempt to help identify new antibiotics.  This comes at a time when the world is entering a ‘post anti-biotic era’, where bacteria are evolving resistance to antibiotics faster than we can invent new ones (read this post for more on that).

You can support the ILIAD Project on Indiegogo; they have a ways to go yet to reach their funding goal so please consider helping them out!  Most antibiotics to date have been accidental or lucky discoveries…a project like this has a lot of potential!

Welcome to the post-antibiotic era

Use humans have had it good since penicillin was first discovered in 1928.  It, and the many other antibiotics that followed, provided us with a defense against bacteria infections which previously posed serious, sometimes fatal threats to our health.  Antibiotics also enabled new forms of treatment that would incredibly weaken our immune systems and otherwise leave us vulnerable to even the mildest infections.  Things like chemotheraphy, organ transplants, bone marrow transplants, for example.

The problem is evolution.  Bacteria have been adapting to our antibiotics faster than we’ve been able to invent new ones.  It’s hard to say exactly when we lost that battle…but there’s little doubt that we’re now in an era where we can not depend on antibiotics like we used to.  This is not to say that all infections will be fatal…but they’ll be much more serious than in the past.  PBS Frontline has a great article and TV spot talking about this (follow this link) and it’s definitely worth checking out.

High use of antibiotics in factory farms is not helping things…though they’re not the only culprit.  Antibiotics are ‘over prescribed’, given out like candy instead of held back for only serious cases.  In any case though, more cautious use of antibiotics is really only going to slow the evolution and just delay the inevitable.

So where do we go from here?  The antibiotic market has not been a very profitable one, historically, at least compared to the other pharmaceutical options.  If that changes, it might attract more R&D dollars which may lead to new antibiotic discoveries…but that’s wishful thinking.  The ‘last line of defense’ antibiotics are already very expensive…and as the problem grows worse, the number of patients willing to pay for a new option will sadly increase.  Developing a new antibiotic is just not something that can be expected to happen quickly…and the big unknown is how long it will be effective, before it too becomes ineffective against an ever-evolving threat.

It’s a long article over at PBS…but something that we should all read, this is a big change coming to our society and the only way we can expect to counter it is if people are informed and act.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria killing more people than AIDS

various-tabletsAccording to this article at Treehugger, antibiotic-resistant bacteria (such as MRSA and CRE) are responsible for more deaths each year than AIDS, in the US at least.   It’s a problem that is only expected to get worse in the coming years.  Not helping matters is the large extent to which antibiotics are used in animal agriculture – it’s estimated that around 80% of antibiotic use (in the US) is for that.  The more we use antibiotics, the faster bacteria will evolve to resist them…there’s no escaping that fundamental fact of evolution.

Government officials at the CDC have recently warned against the emerging threat posed by these ‘superbugs’ as well.  It’s not clear there’s any solution in sight though.  We can slow the spread of these by better sanitation and reduced use of antibiotics, but it’ll continue to be a growing problem for future generations to deal with. 🙁

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