With Apple’s iWatch looking set to have a major health and fitness angle, and likely to be bristling with sensors, it seems likely that a pedometer will be one of them. Patently Apple reports on an Apple patent designed to allow steps to be accurately tracked using a wrist-mounted device. Or, in patentspeak:
In some implementations, optimizations for detecting steps when a pedometer is worn at a user’s wrist are described. In some implementations, a threshold crossing step detection method can be enhanced for wrist locations by counting the number of positive peaks between comparison threshold crossings, adjusting a minimum peak-to-peak threshold for qualifying threshold crossings, and inferring a second step based on the amount of time between threshold crossings. In some implementations, the pedometer can automatically determine that the pedometer is being worn on a user’s wrist.
Jawbone’s design lead Yves Béhar, meantime, has been imagining how “a wearable kit of sensors” could enable us to effectively take our doctor with us wherever we go in a piece written for TIME …
Mobile technology is bringing us closer to the day when we’ll be able to essentially wear our doctors. So when TIME asked me to propose an idea for how design can improve the world, my thoughts quickly turned to medicine. I call my concept–and for now, it is only that–LifeTiles: a wearable kit of sensors for monitoring individual health.
With the sensor system designed to be both “non-invasive” and “aesthetically pleasing,” and enabling us to take a proactive approach to our health, his vision sounds an awful lot like what we’re expecting to see in the iWatch.
Filed under: iOS Devices Tagged: Amplitude, Apple, design, Healthbook, iWatch, Jawbone, Patently Apple, Pedometer, Physical fitness
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