How Far Can The Smartwatch Go?

How Far Can The Smartwatch Go?

by | Jan 24, 2020 | Tech

A lot of tech industry naysayers have been claiming for years that the smartwatch has maxed out its usefulness. This could not be further from the truth, as the smartwatch has continued to evolve each year since its initial launch. Here is a look at some of the major ways that smartwatch technology is developing.

  1. Advanced Health Monitoring

The health monitoring features on the smartwatch continue to improve year after year. This year’s model features a medical-grade heart monitoring application. The watch can already monitor sleep patterns, heart rate fluctuations, and blood pressure. Industry experts believe that in the next five years the watch might be able to detect blood sugar levels, stress levels, and even possess a cancer detection feature. Expect huge leaps in smartwatch biometrics monitoring in the years to come.

  1. Superior Battery Life

A major complaint regarding the smartwatch has been its battery life, with many consumers feeling like the battery should offer far more efficiency. Smartwatch innovators are currently working hard to extend the battery life by leaps and bounds. By making the smartwatch’s CPU, display technology, and other core features much more energy-efficient, it is thought that the battery life could be extended by 60 percent or more.

  1. Advanced Safety Features 

With GPS tracking and video surveillance technology rapidly advancing lately, the smartwatch will eventually incorporate these safety-centric technologies. With a highly accurate built-in GPS tracker, parents can monitor their younger children’s whereabouts much more closely. The video surveillance and video chat features built into the smartwatch are also rapidly advancing, giving users the ability to display in real-time where they are at any given moment. Parents across the world will embrace these evolving safety features.

  1. They’re Becoming More Fashionable

The old days of the smartwatch were admittedly less than fashionable. The device looked fairly clunky and out of place on the wearer’s wrist. That is all changing, however, as the smartwatch is sleeker, more elegant, and more customizable than ever before. Smartwatch wearers no longer have to feel like their device is standing out due to its awkward appearance. The latest designs look like designer timepieces created by leading fashion brands.

  1. Advanced Damage Resistance 

The early smartwatch models were prone to taking on damage quite easily as their LED screens were particularly delicate. That is not the case today, however, as the smartwatch feels like it is nearly indestructible. Advances in watch casing materials will eventually lead smartwatches to the point where they are nearly impossible to damage with heat, water, excess sunlight, or impact. Expect smartwatches in the future to feature titanium and other highly advanced composite materials.

  1. CPU Advances

There will come a day when a simple smartwatch rivals the computer processing power of some of today’s personal computers. The CPUs built into smartwatches are better than ever before and they’re evolving at warp speed. With advanced smartwatch features and greater processing demand coming from consumers, the smartwatch will continue to evolve to keep pace with all of the latest apps, features, and display capabilities. Apple is even working on highly-touted nano-technology that will be incorporated into smartwatches within five years.

  1. Advanced Commerce Features

It is quite tedious and difficult to purchase anything with today’s smartwatch models. That is expected to dramatically change in the future. Not only are advanced e-commerce options being incorporated into the latest smartwatch apps, but eventually people will be able to use their watch to pay for non-virtual goods and services. That’s right, over the next five years smartwatches will possess features that can purchase groceries, gasoline, and other basic essentials.

Are gut trackers the next big thing?

Are gut trackers the next big thing?

by | Apr 19, 2019 | Tech

As personal health technologies such as wearable fitness and sleep trackers increase in popularity, we continue to see advancements in the convenient modern tech that allows us to monitor our health in increasingly complex and accurate ways. These steps forward leave us asking ourselves about the other ways we can use technology to improve our health. Recently, science has discovered that our intestines are much more important to our overall health than we previously thought, and as a result, we may just see gut trackers become the next big thing.

The importance of the gut stems from the enteric nervous system within our gastrointestinal tract. It is a lining made up of over 100 million nerve cells that span from the esophagus to the rectum that covers the entire gastrointestinal tract, and is commonly called our “second brain.” The gut has a direct relationship with the actual brain, and after sensing food or bacteria it will inform the nervous system, which relays this information to the brain and can affect behavior. Because of this connection, we are beginning to realize how we might treat particular disorders and conditions that may have links to the brain and to stress, such as obesity, anorexia, autism, and PTSD.

While our deeper understanding of the gut’s importance is still relatively fresh, the development of gut tracking technology has already begun to make headway, though most deal primarily with digestion. FoodMarble, a digestive health tech startup, is one of the first to produce a digestive tracker: a pocket-sized breath analysis device for users to track their digestion in real time.

When food isn’t quite fully digested, it ferments in the gut and produces hydrogen, most of which is exhaled naturally. FoodMarble users manually input what they’ve eaten and what relevant symptoms they are experiencing into an app, and the breath test is able to discern if the food has been fully digested. As you use the tracker more, the app will give you greater insights into how different types of foods, sleep quality, and stress levels affect their digestive health.

Other advancements in gut tracking are slightly trickier than a breath test. It’s hard to say what a “wearable” gut tracker would look like, but the closest thing to it is an ingestible tech pill developed by researchers at RMIT University in Australia. The pill closely tracks digestion through measuring the gases commonly found in the digestive system, such as hydrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Testing has already revealed new information to researchers. One such discovery is that the stomach releases oxidizing chemicals to break down foreign compounds that stay in the stomach longer than normal. The pill is a much less invasive option for monitoring gut health and human trials have been successful, so it may not be long before doctors are regularly using ingestible pills to help patients with gut problems.

Gut tracking options these days tend to have a purely digestive slant, but there remains great potential for gut trackers to dive into the gut-brain connection that is relevant to a multitude of issues. What if we had a gut tracker that could monitor the enteric nervous system and recognize when the synapses are being relayed from the brain and affecting the way the gut behaves? We are not quite there, but FoodMarble’s digestion tracker and the newly developed ingestible pill to track gut-gases are significant steps forward. Trackers that can monitor the gut-brain connection could very well be just around the corner.