AIRO wristband tracks not just sleep, exercise and stress, but also what you eat

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/28/airo-wristband/

There are fitness wearables that track steps, gauge your quality of sleep and monitor your stress, but few combine all three. As for keeping track of what you eat, most people still resort to old-fashioned food diaries and calorie counters. The AIRO wristband, however, aims to measure all of the above completely automatically. Launching today, the AIRO uses a special embedded spectrometer to track not just your heart rate, but also your sleep patterns, workout intensity and calories consumed. It's even able to break down the nutritional intake of your food.

Abhilash Jayakumar, co-founder and CEO of Airo Heath, tells us it's able to do this because specific nutrients have different light properties. "As your body breaks the food down, the sensor can detect the amount of light that passes through the blood based on green, red and infrared patterns." So, for example, if you just ate a candybar, you'll see a spike in sugar intake reflected on an accompanying AIRO app. The wristband is able to parse the nutritional value of food into protein, fat and carbohydrates. Jayakumar tells us that the app is right now not quite sophisticated enough to tell the difference between simple starches and complex ones, but the team still has more experiments to do, so don't rule that out just yet.

"We might be able to see a difference in waveform, that would show you whether something is better or worse for the body." Further, Jayakumar notes that the AIRO's caloric intake measurement might differ from that on food packaging, because different people process foods differently.

Filed under: Wearables

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