Basis Science is announcing today it has raised $11.5 million in a round of funding for its wrist-based health tracker. The company launched the Basis website and health-tracking system in December and has been shipping units feverishly in an attempt to cull its waiting list for the popular devices. The investment is another vote of confidence in the rapidly expanding field of digital health.

The Basis wrist band functions as a watch, but it also lets you keep a watch on your health habits. The device has built-in sensors that let you monitor your heart rate, the steps you take, how much you sweat, and how many calories you’re burning as a result of your physical activity. Priced at $200, it sits at the high end of devices that are part of the “quantified self” movement, which advocates self-knowledge through measurement of the minute details of your life.

Basis has attracted a lot of attention, and the announcements today will bring it more. The company is adding Deepak Chopra, a healthy living advocate who has written 65 self-help books, and Esther Dyson, an investor and longtime technology analyst. The round was led by Mayfield Fund, with investment from existing investors DCM and Norwest Venture Partners. Tim Chang, a managing director at Mayfield, will rejoin the board of Basis. Chang helped Basis from its infancy and invested while he was previously working at Norwest.

Basis chief executive Jef Holove said in an interview with VentureBeat it will use the money to help meet production demands and scale the business. While other companies are making step counters, Basis Science has always been focused on helping people form lasting healthy habits, he said.

I’ve used the watch, and it can tell me at a glance my heart rate at any moment. It tells the time, how many steps I’ve walked during the day, and how many calories I’ve burned. I’ve also found it very useful at measuring my sleep, or lack of it, telling me something about my habits that I never tracked. I can charge it via universal serial bus while I’m wearing it at my computer, and the data automatically uploads to the web.

On the web, I can see my fitness data over time, including the number of minutes I slept during the night and whether I was interrupted or not.

“Most people in the Valley are sleep-deprived,” Chang said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Measuring sleep is turning out to be important.”

On the web, the data is “gamified” in its presentation, so that I can strive to beat my own records and unlock health goals as I make progress. Holove said he noticed his wife pacing back and forth late at night just so she could hit her daily average for steps. That kind of internal motivation means that the device is doing its job.

“We have an approach to how you make health part of every day,” Holove said. “It’s not fitness exclusively, or a device just for runners. It’s a 24/7 holistic health tracker.”

The watch itself is differentiated because it has a heart-rate monitor, which is also good for detecting whether you are asleep or not. It uses an optical blood-flow sensor that shines a light into the wearers skin and detects the amount of blood flowing. From that, it can deduce the heart rate. That information is something that the other step counters don’t have.

For now, that’s an advantage. But Apple is rumored to be working on its own iWatch, and Basis is going to need all of the investment and resources it can get in order to stay a step ahead of the  giant, which has become like the category-killing Walmart of technology.

Regarding Basis, Chang said in an interview with VentureBeat, “They are the company to beat in this space as the market is flooded with pretty pedometers and no differentiation. Apple could come in and crush the pedometer companies. If all you have is a pedometer, you’re going to get squished.”

Chopra is a heavy hitter when it comes to drawing attention. He has written numerous New York Times bestsellers, and he advocates a holistic approach to health. He is trained as a doctor of internal medicine and endocrinology and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians.

“People can now get a more complete picture of their overall health, with visibility into their activity and sleep, as well as important physiological metrics like heart rate,” said Chopra said in a statement. “This means Basis can offer a more engaging and insightful way for people to get and stay healthy.”

Dyson is known as a Silicon Valley insider (she was actually a guest on Bravo’s ill-fated Startup: Silicon Valley reality TV show). She is an angel investor, entrepreneur, and frequent commentator on health care and health technology. She was also an early proponent of quantified self.

Other advisors include Kevin Colleran (one of the first 10 employees at Facebook), Kai and Charles Huang (creators of Guitar Hero), Patrick McGill (media and entertainment industry veteran), Daniel Kraft of Singularity University, and Jeff Rosenthal along with his co-founders of entrepreneur organization Summit Series.

To date, Basis has raised $20.5 million in revenues. The company hasn’t reported its sales so far, but Holove said that it is working on bringing down its waiting list, which is in the “five figures.” Over time, Basis is going to collect a lot of big data about our bodies.

“The first few weeks of data is encouraging,” Holove said. “People are adopting healthy habits.”

Our team will be off to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas soon, and we’ll get plenty of glimpses of the future of technology there. We’ve all heard a lot of promises. But here are some things we’d love to see and use in real life in the near future — whether or not they’re at CES.

We’re not sure if we can get our wish, but this is the list of the coolest technologies that we can’t wait to use. I’ve relied on staff recommendations and other big thinkers for these tips. Thanks, all.

Tell us which one is your favorite in the poll, or suggest your own in the comments.

Google Glass

This technology is one of the truly inspired products coming down the road. It combines an eyeglass-style display with computing power and wireless technology that can deliver information to you based on what you look at in your surrounding environment. Project Glass promises to deliver information to you the instant you need it, like identifying the face of someone standing in front of you. Or so we hope.

Self-driving cars

Another innovation from Google is going through rigorous testing and the regulatory mill. These cars drive themselves based on computing, wireless, and camera technologies that can make a robot-driven car safer than a human-driven one. You can sit in the driver’s seat and do your email, but you can also override the controls if necessary. Once it’s polished, we’d love to take the car for a spin. But not before they get the bugs out.

Apple television

Okay, this mythical beast doesn’t really have to be made by Apple. But we need a TV that truly combines the best of the Internet and the best of traditional cable television. Apple has hinted something is coming that will transform the living room. We want to be able to play free or 99-cent apps on the high-definition screen and access our favorite TV shows and first-run movies. We have no clue, though, when this rumored Apple device will really arrive (if ever).

A 72-core Tegra 4-based tablet computer

Nvidia hasn’t announced anything yet, but the rumor is it will describe its next-generation Tegra chip at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. If that happens, you can expect that dozens of tablets and smartphones will follow. Tablets thrive on efficient battery use as well as performance. But Nvidia has been moving down the path of creating Tegra technology that offers both low-power consumption and outstanding 3D graphics and processing power at the same time. It’s time for another great leap that could put tablets on par with — or ahead of — the traditional PC.

Cool wireless technologies that don’t make us glow

The bottleneck in delivering fast Internet service to homes and mobile devices has strangled a lot of innovations. Bridging the last mile and delivering blazing-fast speeds to both home and mobile users is one of the great challenges facing us. It could be done with a huge investment in infrastructure, but smart technology might make it a reality as well. Steve Perlman (of Rearden and formerly the head of OnLive) has demoed Project DIDO, a distributed wireless Internet technology that gets around bottlenecks and delivers awesomeness in the not-so-distant future. We hope it’s real. And it would be great and necessary bonus if these technologies were really safe as well.

Cheap rides into space

I’m still waiting for the Southwest Airlines of space travel to arrive. Maybe $99 to the moon and back? After all, we want to be space tourists one day. The space shuttle has died, but maybe private companies will make it happen.

Better robots

It would be nice if we could count on the help of household robots and maybe get all of these great gadgets made by robots working in factories in the U.S. I’d like to try out a few personal robots, once they slim down in size and become a little more humanoid.

Indoor location

CSR’s Sirf Technologies division has figured out how to map indoor locations when you’re walking with your mobile phone inside a building. Now we have to see it in practice. Companies like WifiSLAM are hoping to make this real. We can’t wait until we can find our way through the giant hotel-casinos of Las Vegas without getting lost.

4K televisions that cost $500

I know that 4K TV, or those with four times as many pixels as today’s high-definition TVs, are going to be plentiful at CES. In the past year, these so-called Ultra HD TVs have debuted at prices at $25,000 or so. Can we skip the whole learning curve part and jump to the $500 model soon?

A.I./brains

I need a better brain. Or a brain enhancement. I’m counting on Jeff Hawkins’ Grok technology, which promises to deliver “big data” analysis based on the processing that resembles what happens in the human brain. Or something like it. It’s like those chips in William Gibson’s novel Johnny Mnemonic.

Personal gaming

Will Wright shared a vision last year for personal gaming, or a mobile game that was smart enough to know your interests, know your location, understand your context, and then deliver a surprising, fun gaming experience to you. The game collects a lot of big data about you and processes that. Then it creates a custom experience, a game made for just one person. You.

An awesome game console

How about a great video game console? One with free-to-play games with both traditional game controls and gesture recognition. I’d love to have a wide variety of indie games as well as blockbusters, and I’d like to extend my play to mobile game platforms and the web. Add backward-compatibility and cloud computing. Let’s hope that Sony and Microsoft are listening. Nintendo’s Wii U doesn’t quite do it for me.

Quantified self gadgets that automate calorie counting

We’ve got devices like Striiv that can count our steps. Other gadgets (like the Basis Health Tracker) can monitor our sleep, record our heart rate, and sync with the cloud. But we’d really like to get a device that photographs our meals (or does something like that) and calculates how many calories we’ll consume. This kind of technology could complete the loop in terms of figuring out our physical activity and our food intake, giving us the data we could use to calculate whether we are exercising enough and eating right. (VentureBeat’s John Koetsier supplied this idea, based on the “<a href=”“quantified self” movement where people try to measure everything about themselves).

If this list of new technologies doesn’t sound ambitious enough, we’re also waiting for some pie-in-the-sky science fiction to become reality. We’d like to go for a ride in the Star Trek Holodeck, a virtual reality simulation that is indistinguishable from reality, or live in the Metaverse virtual world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. And I’d like to use that gesture-based computer that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report. But we’re assuming it’s going to take a while before the tech and entertainment industries can deliver on those visions.

Now if Moore’s Law ever stopped in its tracks, the engine behind all of this change would grind to a halt. Then we could say that things might truly get boring. On the other hand, nanotechnology might be quite useful in replacing semiconductor manufacturing with something else. So we’re not counting on getting bored anytime soon.

Image credits: Google, cmmorrison/Flickr, guilhermescha/Flickr, Nvidia, Lionsgate Television, SpaceX, Nao, Microsoft/Bing, LG, VLADGRIN/Shutterstock, Samsung, Samir Torres/VentureBeat

One of my Twitter buddies recently joked that the ideal fitness device will be a neck collar that monitors the food going down your throat and then chokes you when you hit your calorie limit.

These devices don’t do that. But they may get you to hum the tune to “Chariots of Fire” when you exercise and motivate you to take an extra step or two. After all, they track your every move, and they won’t lie to you.

Take it from me: These are powerful motivators, and any one of them would be a good choice for you or your loved ones.

Basis Health Tracker, $199

This wristwatch health tracker from Basis Science packs a lot of technology. It uses an accelerometer to track your steps. It has a galvanic skin sensor to detect your sweat. It has an optical blood-flow sensor to track your heartbeat. It has a skin temperature sensor and an ambient room temperature sensor, so it knows if you’re hot because you are exercising or because you’re in a hot room. It also monitors when you’re sleeping and knows the best time to wake you up.

You can log onto the Basis Science website and study your stats via a cloud-based web service. The service focuses on actionable information, like reminders that you’ve been sitting in a chair for 40 minutes. The site tells you more about why it’s important to get enough sleep and allows you to drill down into the data to see patterns. With all of that data, you can learn what impact your physical activity has on your body, such as how it stirs your heart rate. Basis Science says that, due to overwhelming demand, it has stopped taking orders and will be shipping current orders in early 2013.

Striiv Smart Pedometer, $70

This second-generation device from Striiv can clip onto your clothing. It’s so small you’ll forget it’s there. The blue digital display shows the number of steps you’ve taken. It communicates with your iPhone via Bluetooth, so you can run Striiv’s iOS app to learn more about your habits. You can use the iPhone app alone to track your steps, since the phone comes with its own accelerometer. But the Striiv pedometer also has an altimeter, which can track how many stairs you climb in a day.

The pedometer tracks your steps and the app calculates how many miles you’ve walked. It also shows how many calories you’ve burned in a day, but it does not have access to your heart rate information. The app includes a fantasy-oriented role-playing game called MyLand. If you complete challenges, you earn points that you can then spend on goods in the fantasy world. Striiv says the new app can run in the background of your iOS device, and it won’t drain your battery.

On a bad day, my Striiv app step counter will tell me all of the steps I didn’t take. But on a recent trip to London, I managed to walk more than 36,000 steps in a single day. That was about seven miles and is equivalent to about 22 percent of the walking I usually do in a month. One of these days, I want to beat that all-time record. And I’ll gladly return to London to do it.

Fitbit One, $99

The folks at Fitbit are on their third device since they created the Fitbit Classic pedometer in 2008. Now the Fitbit One can track your steps, distance traveled, calories burned, stairs climbed, and your sleep. The device screen (which shows only a number) tells you how many steps you’ve moved.

The new device clips to your clothing easily. It syncs wirelessly with your smartphone via Bluetooth, or you can sync it via USB or Wi-Fi on your computer. You can look at your stats on the web. It’ll also teach you how to sleep better and will wake you up in the morning. It has a nice ecosystem of other devices, including the Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi scale and the Fitbit Zip for tracking kids.

You can set your own goals and challenges with the Fitbit One. Check out fellow VentureBeat writer Devindra Hardawar’s review here, in which he compares the One to the Jawbone Up.

Jawbone Up, $130

The first Up didn’t fare so well, since production problems made the device glitchy. Jawbone issued refunds and pulled it off the market. But it reissued the device recently. This time, the device isn’t as susceptible to water damage.

You can use it to track your steps, distance moved, calorie count, activity time, and activity intensity. It also tracks your light and deep sleep as well as your waking moments.

It comes with a bright iOS app that allows you to study your stats. And you can also use it to track your meals and share pictures of what you’re eating with your friends. If you really want to find out how many calories you’ve consumed, you can do so by checking against a big food database.

The battery lasts for 10 days, and the design is water-resistant. If you take a nap, it will wake you up at the optimal time, around 26.5 minutes. It reminds you to move when you have been inactive for too long. It has no display, so you can’t check your movements while on the move. You also have to sync it to your iPhone by plugging it into your headphone jack. Check out our review.

Larklife, $150

This baby from Lark tracks your steps and distance moved. It also tracks the type of exercise, the amount of time you spend doing it, the calories you burn, and when you started and stopped. If you have been inactive for a while, it will send you an alert to get moving. It tracks your sleep and offers you coaching about it.

As a diet logger, it tries to reduce the dullness of manually entering the meals you eat. It has a list of foods, letting you log what you eat with the touch of a button. You can also tap the screen to log that you have drunk a glass of water. This set of features about food intake is crucial to completing the loop of information about your activity, your body’s reaction to it, and refueling. However, it’s easy to forget.

If you remember, then Larklife can remind you of the best time of day for you to eat and how much you should eat.

Nike+ FuelBand, $150

The new Nike+ FuelBand gadget is a wristband that allows you to capture data on a variety of activities, like tossing a Frisbee or throwing a football. It collects information on exercise time, calories burned, steps taken, and overall movement. You wear it all day and transfer the data to the Nike+ web site through a USB or via your iPhone.

You can set a daily NikeFuel goal and track your progress. It syncs with the Nike+FuelBand app, which you can use to track your activity history and connect with friends online. Like the Fitbit One, the wristband has a display on the plastic. It can tell you the time, your goal, your steps walked, and other text-based information. You can share your achievements via Facebook, Twitter, and Path. It also just launched a NikeFuel Missions game, which is an attempt to “gamify,” or motivate you to do more exercise through entertainment.

BodyMedia Fit Core Armband, $149

You wear this watch-like band around your upper arm. The device is a third smaller than previous armbands created by BodyMedia. You can see the stats on the optional display device. It claims it has the “most accurate calories burned” number. An online subscription of $6.95 a month is required after a free trial period. The device comes with a wireless link.

Sensors track your motion and capture 5,000 points of data per minute, such as your sweat level, the rate at which heat leaves your body, your galvanic skin response, and skin temperature. With this data, BodyMedia calculates the calories you burn throughout a day. It also captures info on your sleeping patterns such as how long it takes to fall asleep. It gives you steps taken, calories burned, and your sleep patterns.

Mio Alpha

This one is for professional athletes. Mio Global says this heart-rate monitor and wristwatch is the first performance-level strapless monitor that can measure your heart rate accurately at up to 12 miles per hour. It uses optical blood flow technology to sense the volume of blood under your skin. This measures your heart rate and calculates other data such as speed, distance, pace, and location. You can connect it via Bluetooth to your smartphone.

The device is not available yet, but the company says it is launching soon. Pricing details haven’t been disclosed yet.

Under Armour E39

This is a “compression shirt” that has sensors for tracking an athlete’s biometrics. It captures heart rate, breathing rate, lung capacity, acceleration, body positioning and motion. The device has an accelerometer, microprocessor, and built-in storage, and it connects wirelessly to any smartphone, tablet, or computer.

The circular device in the middle, dubbed “the bug,” contains a computer, hard drive, and accelerometer. Under Armour is targeting college and pro sports teams with the shirt. It isn’t available just yet.

Fitness tracking devices have invaded our lives, seeking to quench our thirst for data about whether we’re healthy or not. But Basis Science is hoping to create the mother of all devices with the unveiling today of its Basis Health Tracker and accompanying cloud-based web service.

The multisensor device doubles as a wrist watch, and it monitors your heart rate, sleep patterns, and how much you sweat. Then, it takes that data and presents it to you in a useful way, allowing you to keep track of your health trends over time, said Jef Holove, the chief executive of Basis Science, in an interview with VentureBeat.

“Every year in their quest to become healthier, millions of people join a gym, start a new health program, or download a fitness app,” said Jef Holove, CEO, Basis in San Francisco. “But often these approaches require us to log our lives manually, are too rigid to accommodate life’s ups and downs, or can be too time-consuming to fit our busy schedules.”

The $199 device uses a novel optical blood flow sensor to track your heart rate. It shines a light-emitting diode (LED) light into your skin. Then it measures the light that bounces back to see how much blood is flowing through your veins. It uses that information to calculate your heart rate. That data is what is missing from standard pedometers and fitness trackers from companies such as Jawbone, Fitbit, Nike Fuelband, and Striiv.

“We felt that being the best fitness tracker in a series of trackers wasn’t the best goal,” said Holove. “We wanted to improve users’ health.”
Basis has spent a few years figuring out how to get people to truly adopt lasting healthy habits. It says that research from the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology shows that approximately 50 percent of people starting a new exercise regime drop it within six months, citing lack of time as a key reason. With Basis, all you have to do is wear the watch all day long.

Basis helps you become aware of your fitness with minimal effort and plenty of nudges and rewards. But it isn’t overly game-like since many people take their health very seriously and don’t think of it as a game, said Holove. He believes that allowing people to make small changes in their fitness and sleep routines works best for a busy lifestyle.

Basis offers you rewards in the form of points when you achieve your goals. On the website, users can access data on more than 10 different habits related to their physical activity and sleep. Recommendations include getting moving, particularly if you’ve been sitting around for a half hour. The device can also prompt you to go to sleep at the same time each night, and it explains why that is important to your overall health. You can then drill down on the data and look at your sleep pattern over a period of month. You can slice the data any way you want and see how active you are compared to the prior week.

Like other devices, Basis uses a three-axis accelerometer to sense motion. That sensor captures your footsteps. As mentioned, it also captures your heart rate. A galvanic skin sensor captures your perspiration and skin temperature. The device also detects the temperature of the air so that it knows whether your skin is hot because of exercise or the weather. The device can also detect just how much impact your workout is having on your body. It captures your sleep down to the minute and figures out if you woke up at all or had a good night of uninterrupted sleep.

All of that physiological data is then uploaded to a secure, cloud-based service where Basis calculates your activity — including steps taken, calories burned, sleep quality, and resting heart rate. The process is automated, so you don’t have to remember to turn the device on when you wake up or otherwise switch modes manually.

That data should make “quantified self” fans happy because they can delve into a search of self-knowledge. But Holove said that Basis wants to strike a balance by giving you enough information so that you can answer the question, “Now what?”

Holove said that it took a long time to get the service right. But the delays in launching the product also helped lower its overall costs. The optical blood flow monitor is similar to the kind used in hospitals to monitor your heart rate. Over time, that technology has gotten cheaper and light enough to wear on your wrist.

“We wanted to take more time on the device itself, testing it fully for quality reasons,” he said. “We also spent more time thinking about what we wanted to achieve.” The team looked at books such as Persuasive Technology to get a sense for what some of the big thinkers thought about improving health.

Founded five years ago, Basis Science has raised $9 million from Norwest Venture Partners and Doll Capital Management. You can buy the Basis Health Tracker on the company’s website. Shipments start in early December.

The company was started by Nadeem Kassam, who had previously started an entertainment company. A dedicated Bikram yogi, he decided that something fundamental was missing in health improvement.

Tim Chang, a former partner at Norwest, noted recently that it would be cool to wear the tracker and then compare it to your Google Calendar. You could then figure out how stressful it is to drive on the Bay Area’s 101 freeway at rush hour or how stressed you get in a meeting with your boss. Holove said Basis doesn’t measure those things yet, but they could be on the horizon.

Here’s a video of Holove showing off the Basis Health Tracker.