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MILES O'BRIEN: "Wearing your heart on your sleeve" is taking
on a whole new meaning. At the 2016 pilgrimage to Las Vegas for
gadget geeks - CES - wearable health tracking devices broke
into full stride, winning much more than a bit of flashy floor
space and heated hype. An estimated 500 million people
worldwide apparently now feel the need to copiously log their
steps, leaps, strokes and spins, while recording their breathing,
heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns and food intake --
just to name a few. And then of course, brag about it online.
Peter Neilson is CEO of a Denver startup called femtoScale
Miles O'Brien: Seems like there's no limit to the amount of data
people want to get, right? Would you agree with that?
What's going on?
PETER NEILSON: In wearables?
MILES O'BRIEN: Yeah.
PETER NEILSON: Blowing up. That's half of CES this year.
It looks like it's wearable trying to compute everything.
MILES O'BRIEN: Neilson's company is developing a portable
- and eventually wearable - sensor that can provide real
time readings of air quality by weighing airborne particles much
too small to see. The scale is just barely visible. I needed a
jeweler's magnifying glass to see it. FemtoScale was among
the nearly two-dozen small businesses supported by the
National Science Foundation, displaying their wares in the
Eureka Park section of CES. Eureka Park was cofounded by NSF
in 2012 as a way to showcase the "bleeding edge" technology it is
helping along. Steven Konsek is director of the Small Business
Innovation Research Program at NSF.
STEVEN KONSEK: Our program funds small businesses, mainly
startup companies that are developing game-changing
technologies that have big commercial upside.
MILES O'BRIEN: This year wearables dominated Eureka Park
- thanks to a perfect storm of technological advances: Sensors
are rapidly shrinking in size and cost; communications between
devices has improved; and so has battery life. And of course
none of it could happen without the ubiquity of smartphones -
our mobile switchboard for all things technological. San Jose-
based Stratio has shrunk a spectrometer down to palm size.
The device shines a bright light on food and medicine to
determine if they are what they purport to be. In this
demonstration, CEO Jae Hyung Lee compared counterfeit, generic
and genuine Viagra to the fingerprint-like spectroscopic
pattern of the real McCoy. It was instantly obvious which
were the imposters.
JAE HYUNG LEE: So far people were just interested themselves,
right? But now, they want to know what they're eating.
They want to know more about what they're buying. They want to know what's
going on around them, right.
MILES O'BRIEN: Clearly, exercise and nutrition tracking
alone, are not enough to satisfy entrepreneurs or consumers in
the health-tracking space. Kaustubh Kale is CEO of a Boca
Raton startup called AventuSoft. They are developing a wearable
heart monitor and electrocardiogram.
KAUSTUBH KALE: There's not a pushback anymore, you know? People are
already wearing Fitbit or any of the other wearables so they're
already accepting of these new technologies. And now as
the technology improves, you can now push it into the
medical grade domain.
MILES O'BRIEN: The wearable industry is all about heart…
and sole too. Salt Lake City-based Veristride is
developing highly "sensorized" insoles.
STACY BAMBERG: So this version right here has two big square
sensors—these are the pressure sensors -- and then underneath the
arch is where we put the electronics, so…
MILES O'BRIEN: CEO and founder Stacy Bamberg got the idea as a
way to help amputees and stroke patients in physical therapy.
The real-time data provides visual or auditory cues to help
them walk with better balance. But Stacy believes as the
insoles get thinner and more comfortable, the real-time
feedback might catch on with runners.
MILES O'BRIEN: What's the future going to be then? Are we
just going to be sensors from head to toe?
STACY BAMBERG: I think the future is this stuff is built
into our clothes. We don't have to think about it. It connects -
it sends it to our app wirelessly. We're able to get
the information we want without feeling like we got something
latched onto us.
STEVEN KONSEK: Almost all the companies that are here have
gone on and raised now private capital based on some of the
work that we've helped them do.
MILES O'BRIEN: And maybe one day this seed money will yield a
crop of better, more sophisticated sensors for us all
to wear in good health.
For Science Nation, I'm Miles O'Brien.