Topic: COMMUNITY INTEREST
Wearables Dirty Little Secret
We interviewed employees of several different wearable sensor companies, their top engineers. What we learned is what we already knew, they only validated it.
There is a significant struggle to accurately measure things from your wrist. Every company who is marketing these devices are hiding serious flaws.
Acceleromter-based sensors are popular because they do not require contact with the skin. But while they are okay at counting steps, they are terrible with finer movements like breathing and heart rate, since they cannot isolate them from the other vibrations all around us.
Optical sensors, used for temperature, heart rate, and oxygen levels, detect only sruface temperatures and not core body temperatures. Such senors can supply garbage date if they are facing a window or if they are near an HVAC duct, a plasma TV, or a hot car.
Patches rarely work as claimed because of temperature changes, sweat and just plain variance from human to human. Swallowable temperatures sensors are accurate, but no one wants to swallow a sensor each day.
Think of it this way. Would you black out your car windshield and drive with only your Google maps showing the road and turns? That's about the precision of today's wearables.
