A New Breed of Wearables Will Give You Data You Can Actually Use

Over the past year, we’ve seen an influx of devices that measure our movements: steps, distance traveled, calories burned, and how many hours we spend on the couch. Most of these wearable computers, which are usually worn on the wrist, are little more than pumped-up pedometers that sync to smartphones apps, providing us with simple, general data about our levels of activity — or, in most cases, the depths of our inactivity.

But now, some companies are taking the wearables idea one step further, building devices that not only record your movements and lay them out in simple graphs, but also collect data in 3-D space and provide analysis of different areas of body awareness. These smarter wearables can help you stand straighter, jump higher, and swing a baseball bat faster.

“Things like Fitbit and Jawbone are lacking — they’re just stats without any 3-D movement,” said Nikola Hu, co-founder of the sports wearable company Moov. The company’s device can be strapped to your wrist, arm, or ankle, where it captures data about calories burned, but also many of the movements made by your arms and legs. Using artificial intelligence algorithms and a sensor that measures movement in 3-D space, it compares your form in activities like running or boxing to that of an ideal model (i.e., previously captured movement data from an expert-level athlete). The device can compare not only the form of your right hook, for example, but also the speed of each punch. The accompanying app then gives you audio feedback to improve your form, acting like a real-time virtual coach. Hu and co-founder Meng Li decided to create Moov, which is shipping this summer, to help people perform their workouts as effectively and efficiently as possible, while also reducing their chances of injury.

Motion capture isn’t new, of course. The Wii and Kinect first introduced the technology on a mass scale in our living rooms. But the Kinect and Wii work by using larger sensors spaced out in a room — infrared projectors, cameras, accelerometers and IR detection, all feeding back to a base unit where the heavy data processing takes place. Some of today’s wearables are capable of performing motion capture and data crunching on par with the Wii — and even bettering it in some cases — but in a form factor smaller than a credit card.

Advanced Movement Analysis in a Pint-Size Package

Moov, a cylindrical disc about the size of an Oreo cookie, uses an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to pinpoint your exact movements. For an activity like running, it can track your cadence, stride, and the impact force of each step, as well as make sure you’re balancing evenly on your feet. The Moov manages to extrapolate this data even when only a single unit is strapped to your ankle. It captures movement data along nine axes, analyzes it, and then uses AI algorithms to figure out how well you’re doing. A companion app then delivers Siri-like voice commands to help you improve your performance and efficiency as you are training.

“Before, you wouldn’t know this information without a gait analysis (a costly clinical evaluation of your stride). Now, pros and beginners can get this data,” Hu says.

Lumo Lift is another example of how fitness trackers are going beyond simple data “tracking,” and wrists. Unlike the Moov, the pin-like gadget attaches to your shirt, undershirt, or bra strap using a magnetic clasp, and is designed, in part, to help keep you from slouching and hunching.

“The wrist is a very noisy environment,” Lumo Lift co-founder Andrew Chang says. “You can do step counting and calorie burn quite well now, but a lot of other things are impossible.”

Things like, say, monitoring your posture. Inside, the Lumo Lift houses many of the things you’d expect to find in a wearable: an ARM processor, a 3-axis accelerometer, Bluetooth LE chip, and onboard memory. Unlike other wearables, its software is specifically optimized to not only know you’re moving, but also to know what type of movements you’re making (and how efficiently you are doing them). Like the Moov, the key to this is Lumo Lift’s biomechanical model.

A biomechanical model is a representation of the human body and how it moves. Lumo Lift’s version is specific to the upper body, because of the type of movement it’s tracking. To get a sense of the complexity involved in creating an accurate model, this comprehensive example described in a UCLA research paper takes into account 68 bones, 147 points of movement, and 814 muscles in order to accurately represent and reproduce human upper body movements (the exact number of points Lumo Lift’s model incorporates wasn’t available to be shared). It populates this mechanical model with data from the device’s sensors, which is then normalized and calibrated. Because of the constraints associated with device and battery size, these algorithms have to be super efficient and low-power.

Wahoo Fitness also decided the wrist wasn’t the right place for its smart wearable. Its Tickr Run and Tickr X, available later this spring, are worn like a heart rate monitor, strapped to your chest.

Tickr Run focuses on evaluating your running efficiency. It does this by performing motion analysis, looking at your change of acceleration in three dimensions, and pinpointing your landing data. If you’re a novice runner and “heel striker,” for example, you land each step heel first. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but in reality, you’re losing momentum each time your heel strikes, which means you then have to re-accelerate as the rest of your foot makes contact. That constant deceleration and acceleration takes more energy. If you’re running style is bouncy, you’re also wasting unnecessary energy.

Tickr Run gives you feedback on your performance in real time during your run and provides deeper post-run analytics too. In the app during your run, you can see a picture of a runner with different hotspots that can go green, yellow, or red. These let you know you can improve your smoothness if you adjust certain running mechanics. After your workout, you can also see more robust metrics, like ground contact time, your side-to-side sway, and how you performed at the beginning versus the end of the run.

Wahoo has studied a lot of runners in order to do this type of gait detection. The company has a PhD in kinesiology on staff who’s spent many years studying thousands of runners. Over the last four to six months, the team brought in 10 to 12 runners a day in order to study their movements and perfect the Tickr’s algorithms.

“We went into a lot of treadmill testing, using motion capture cameras all around the treadmill to compare data versus visual cues,” Wahoo’s chief marketing officer Mike Stashak told WIRED.

But while the tech and algorithms behind these types of advanced wearables are key to how they function, it doesn’t matter if they aren’t something you’d actually want to wear.

Form Is Just as Important as Function

“What people want is flexibility,” Lumo Lift’s Chang said. The company solves this problem using — what else? — magnets. You can attach the Lumo Lift to a variety of places on your upper body, like a pin, but without poking holes through your clothing. You can also choose to wear the sensor or the simple square metallic clasp on the outside of your clothing. On top of that, it’s modular: For the clasp, a variety of colors and styles are available, making it look more like a pin, brooch, or design element of your shirt, not just a square sensor.

“When you’re building wearables, you have to be user-centric,” Chang says. Lumo BodyTech got the inspiration for its design through user feedback. “They wanted an upper body solution with the flexiblity to wear it in different ways — to be able to show it off or wear it discreetly.”

After a lot of trial and error and “breaking things,” the Lumo BodyTech team came up with its innovative, intuitive wearable implementation.

For fitness-focused products, looks may not be quite as make-or-break. Moov’s black or white medallion, worn strapped to your arm or ankle, isn’t unattractive by any means, but it’s no fashion feat either. Wahoo’s Tickr straps are designed to be worn underneath your workout attire, so appearances are far less important. It looks essentially the same as a heart rate monitor — a plastic sensor affixed to a black elastic strap that you wear across your chest.

These types of wearables mark a new way we can live and train. Each offers the power to not only track your movements, but to analyze them in a way that previously required a console, a computer, or a trip to a full-fledged lab.

“This is what researchers 10 years ago were doing in labs with big computers,” Wahoo’s Mike Stashak said. “Now we can do it with our smartphones, and the average person can do it. And they can use this data in whatever way they want.”