drag2share: 'Wello' iPhone case can track your blood pressure, temperature and more

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/06/wello/

Last year, Scanadu caught our attention with Scout, its simple-to-use tricorder-style health monitor. Now a new iPhone case promises to make monitoring your vital signs even easier. Called Wello, the case has sensors built in that can give you a picture of your overall health after holding it a special way for just a few seconds. The slim device measures your heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and blood oxygen levels and displays the ECG waves from your heart -- you can even test your lung function through a small included attachment you blow into.

Designed to be both fast and simple to use, the prototype we tried out this week was ultra-light, and thinner than the Speck case on one of our iPhones. Readings are done with your hands in a comfortable position, and the health tracker was able to return our vital signs as well as a fancy ECG graph of our heart in just a few seconds. Out of the box, you'll be able to pair it with your Wi-Fi scale and fitness tracker, so you can keep an overall picture of your health in the same place. Over time, additional add-ons could become available for the case to test for other things like glucose. Everything you track can be viewed on a daily, weekly, or monthly scale so you can see at a glance if your health starts to change.

Founder and CEO Hamish Patel has been working on the technology behind Wello for two years. He told us that he sees the device not only being useful for people in the US, but even more so for people in developing countries where access to health services are limited. When the $199 device ships this fall (pending FDA approval) it will be available for the iPhone 4S, 5, and 5S in 35 countries. Android users can also use Wello, but as a standalone device rather than a case for their phone. All of the tech for Wello is contained in a removable card roughly the thickness of your average business card. Azio plans to make the card available for other manufacturers to include in cases, so you might ultimately see Wello come to a third-party Android case, or even a different iPhone case.

Wello is open for pre-orders today in United States as well as Canada, China, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Kingdom and across the EU. Early buyers can earn $10 for each person they get to pre-order -- depending on how many people you refer, tracking your health could be not only easy, it could be free.

Filed under: Cellphones, Science, Mobile

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