SAN FRANCISCO — Representatives from the AARP and Geisinger Health System make no pretensions: They’re not into technology just because it’s cool.

While the 50-and-over population and doctors appear to be dissimilar markets, selling to either requires a deep understanding of customer needs rather than just a sense of having “the next big thing.”

If you’re a startup targeting either market, you need to wise up.

Here are a couple pointers from the AARP and Geisinger, gleaned from a panel discussion at HealthBeat today.

How can entrepreneurs sell into a health system?

Geisinger Health System serves over 3 million people and is a strong case study in how to deliver effective care. Chanin Wendling leads their eHealth initiatives and gets so many calls each week from entrepreneurs that she says her “head is spinning.”

“Everyone has a cool new idea but no one has tested it,” Wendling says.

For startups that want to work with Geisinger, Wendling first wants to see a solid clinical business case where the technology solves a tangible problem that patients or physicians face.

Once approved, her team will pilot the technology, sometimes three or four different ways, to figure out the right approach to product launch.

The technology must also integrate with their online medical records, and Wendling anticipates that the system will implement a data integration layer to facilitate more seamless deployment of technology in the future.

Understanding the 50-and-over market

The 100 million people who comprise the digital health market for 50-and-over is worth about $20 billion. Nice market, if you can get it.

Jody Holtzmann, a senior vice president at AARP, advocates that startups embrace the idea of “connected living,” which includes maintaining relationships with family, preserving autonomy, and enjoying life, rather than just connected health (focused on health maintenance.)

For the aging, adopting products in order to live life on their own terms is more appealing than using technology to assist with medication adherence. For example, the physical fitness market for 50-and-over is projected to reach $1.8 billion over the next five years.

But for now, Holtzmann asserts that the “quantified self” movement doesn’t reasonate with his target population: “You’re a fanatic and wearing a self-tracking device is a way to let everyone know what a fanatic you are,” he says.

Instead, he advocates that startups approach this group in a way that’s engaging, inviting, and, most importantly, fun.

Photo: Meghan Kelly, VentureBeat, moderator of the session. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — What do the most innovative doctors and nurses really think about the new wave of medical technology?

While investors and entrepreneurs are making noise about opportunities in the space, health care providers are often the silent, reluctant partner. But to continue to stay at the top of their field, providers are keeping tabs on innovation and new products.

So we invited clinicians from Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University to HealthBeat to discuss the new technology they are piloting in their hospitals, and the gaps that entrepreneurs can fill.

“One of our big challenges is making ourselves accessible,” said Faye Karnavy Sahai, vice president of innovation at Kaiser Permanente (pictured above, right). But Kaiser has built its brand around innovation at the front lines of healthcare, and claims its 17,000 doctors and 49,000 nurses are exposed to new ideas across the spectrum.

“We also work independently with a lot of entrepreneurs and give them advice,” added Sumbul Desai (above, center), a doctor who works as the associate chief medical officer for strategy and innovation at Stanford.

To guide investment in the space, Stanford offers startup founders the opportunity to pilot their technology. A number of innovation fellowships are also available, and the hospital works closely with the accelerator program StartX Med.

“Every morning we’ll meet with folks in the entrepreneurial community — we love doing it and are super invested,” Desai said.

What are the biggest challenges for health entrepreneurs?

Desai said one of the biggest issues is that entrepreneurs don’t do their homework. There are unique regulatory, privacy and compliance issues involved with health care — HIPAA compliance is just the beginning. In addition, founders aren’t as aware as they should be about the competitive market.

The other challenge is integration. Desai stressed that new products need to work well with existing workflows. Kaiser is working on centralizing its electronic medical records (EMR) system, echoing a nationwide trend. To that end, Kaiser inked a deal with Epic Systems, the electronic health record company that health entrepreneurs have a love-hate relationship with.

“Epic is the cornerstone of how we look at our data,” said Desai.

Epic has been criticized for hampering innovation due to its closed system that shuts out third parties. But it has a dominant position in hospitals, and isn’t wise to ignore.

Another issue the speakers raised is that entrepreneurs can often get too fixated on the idea, and not consider the organization that they plan to fit into. It’s easier said than done. So for this reason, startup founders like ConsultingMD’s Owen Tripp are opting to team up with physicians.

And the biggest opportunities?

One of the hottest areas is patient care, but Desai warned that it’s “just one piece of the puzzle.”

Consumer technology is slowly making its way into hospitals. Kaiser is experimenting with putting real-time location data in sponges to prevent them from being left in patients’ bodies during surgery (and producing an ensuing publicity nightmare). In addition, nurses can check in using location proximity badges, making it far easier to track their movements.

Some of the less “sexy” areas include reimbursement and data analysis.

“Big data and analytics will be huge — expect to see predictive diagnostic capabilities,” said Desai. Much of this data will be mined from fitness trackers like FitBit and Jawbone’s Up, which are used by patients as part of a “quantified self” trend.

When asked about the one piece of technology that would be most beneficial, Desai urged innovators in the audience to think big. Physicians need ”an overall digital experience,” she explained, that will clearly list out patient visits, second opinions, virtual visits, and so on.

“Too often we see separate small companies and pockets of innovation right now,” she said.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

SAN FRANCISCO — Aetna, one of the largest health insurance providers in the world, is changing the way it thinks about itself.

Last year, chief executive Mark Bertolini said Aetna was no longer in the insurance business, it is in the information business.

Now, the company is turning into a fitness app maker too. Next month, Aetna will launch an iPhone app and website for managing your fitness, encouraging you to eat and live in a more healthy way, and monitoring your personal health information.

If you’re an Aetna customer, the app, called CarePass, will integrate your personal medical records with data from popular fitness-tracking devices like Withings Wi-Fi-enabled scales, Fitbit’s Flex wristband, and Jawbone’s Up wristband, as well as apps like MapMyFitness. If you’re an Aetna customer, it’ll be accessible through the same sign-on you use with Aetna’s web portal, Aetna Navigator. But you can use it to integrate data from various sources even if you aren’t an Aetna customer.

“We want a consumer to be able to see the information they care about from a healthcare perspective,” said Aetna’s head of business development, Dan Conroy (pictured above), who gave a sneak peek of the upcoming app at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s health technology conference here.

It’s a consumer-friendly app with an approachable, simple design, based on Conroy’s short walk-through. When signing on to the app, people have a choice of looking at their data, picking a goal to work towards (like losing a pound or fitting into their favorite jeans), or getting medical care. The third option leads to another app, iTriage, which Aetna acquired in 2012, Conroy said.

Once you’ve picked a goal, the app can help you get there by setting achievable daily goals, like running a certain number of miles or consuming a certain number of calories. It can also show you how much you’ve walked each day (assuming it has step data from one of the compatible devices) and other details.

If you’ve given it access to your medical data, the app will also let you see vital stats like your body measurements, BMI, blood pressure, blood glucose level, and more details, all drawn from your last visit to the doctor’s office. It can also pull in data about your recent office visits and medications, and can even help remind you to take your meds.

There’s also a web version of the app.

Aetna’s challenge is going to be a steep one, given the large number of fitness apps out there. Many of them already integrate with a variety of different data sources — for instance, Runkeeper can also integrate data from Withings scales and Fitbit fitness-trackers; MapMyFitness helps you track your food consumption as well as your exercise; MyFitnessPal has an app library (as does Runkeeper); and all three are extensible through open APIs. And that’s just scratching the surface of the fitness-tracking universe.

Aetna has a couple of huge advantages, however: For instance, it has 38 million customers and made almost $500 million in profits in the most recent fiscal quarter.

The app won’t launch until June, but developers interested in integrating their apps can check out Aetna’s CarePass developer portal.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

MapMyFitness offers a suite of fitness apps that support an active lifestyle with tools to map routes, track activity, log food intake and connect with others for motivation. The company was founded in 2007 and has since grown to 15 million users, five distinct products (MapMyRun, MapMyRide etc…) and an MVP premium membership with advanced features. Over 300,000 thousand workouts are logged everyday.

The new look includes improved functionality that makes it easier to navigate around the app and access various features, a greater emphasis on social sharing, and a fresh design that unifies the various products. CEO and founder Robin Thurston said that the updates are the result of six months of research and analysis of user behavior and is the most extensive design update in the last three years.

“The biggest trend we have seen thus far is the amount of our community accessing our site through their mobile phones and tablets,” he said in a Q&A. “This was critical in our design process. Having a unified brand and design for is really important because users want a seamless experience when they work out. From day one, we recognized the importance of having an open platform where people can house all of their workout data, no matter what device they are using.”

The new navigation tool bar has three main components. There is Home, where your personal activity is documented; Improve, which has training plans and device integration; and Discover, which is the first phase of the Local pages which will help people find fitness options around them. These features are all easily accessible from the dashboard. Furthermore, MapMyFitness integrates with ‘hundreds’ of fitness devices and sensors and the sharing tools are enhanced so people can more easily engage their friends in their workouts.

Thurston said that MapMyFitness has made a strategic shift towards design over the last 18 months and hired a new creative team to build out the new look. The greatest challenge, he said, was finding the right team, but it paid off in a “cleaner,” “simpler,” and “more beautiful” site.

Quantified self devices, mobile technology, and activity trackers have had a powerful impact on people’s fitness habits. MapMyFitness is one of many in the fitness tracking space, including Runkeeper, Skimble, and Endomondo, and  Thurston said that in the next five years, he expects this space will see “rapid change and disruption.” By listening to user feedback and continuing to iterate, Thurston seeks to remain competitive and even dominant in the sector. His goal is not only to encourage people to be more active, but to use technology to actually change outcomes.

MapMyFitness is based in Austin, Texas and has raised $18.5 million to date.

Photo Credit: gareth 1953/Flickr

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

It was only a matter of time before the quantified self movement and the photo-sharing obsession combined.

Memoto is a “life logging” camera that captures photos every 30 seconds. The company demoed the device at South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, hoping to generate interest and attract buyers for the small $279 device.

Candid photos often turn out better than posed ones, and disrupting a wonderful moment to capture it is not ideal. This tiny camera clips on a collar or a jacket, andyou can even wear it as a necklace. Photographers can then go about their day without the persistent need to photography and document everything.

The device includes a clock and GPS, and it works with an application that you can use to review the photos or watch a time-lapse video of a series of the image. Images are organized for you, and the archives are searchable by time and location.

“The camera and the app work together to give you pictures of every single moment of your life, complete with information on when you took it and where you were. This means that you can revisit any moment of your past,” said a product description on the company’s website.

Memoto holds up to 6,000 photos (8GB) and comes with a year of free online photo storage, and the battery allegedly works for two days before needing a recharge. Right now, it doesn’t have social media integrations, although that is likely in the pipeline. The device does not have an off-switch or a way to delete photos, which of course raises security and privacy concerns.

People are constantly capturing data in this ever-connected mobile world, whether it is logging places they have been or tracking cardiovascular activity during exercise. It seems our generation is rabid for evidence of our own existence. Memoto’s Kickstarter campaign surpassed its goal by more than a factor of ten. The Swedish startup set up a $50,000 campaign and raised $550,189 from 2,871 backers. A group of European investors also contributed, bringing Memoto’s financing to almost $1 million.

Preorders are now available and delivery is estimated for April.

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.”

Active Mind Technology is seeking to remake the game of golf with Game Golf, which measures a golfer’s stats and makes them available for you to analyze and share with your friends. It is one more example of how technology can provide us with way too much information about ourselves as well as how far golf has to go arrive in the 21st century.

The wearable product tracks the location of your shots, the distance the ball traveled, and which club you used. Then it syncs that data to the cloud, and you can look at the results on your smartphone and then share them with your friends. The device is another example of the craze for the “quantified self,” a movement that advocates self-knowledge through numbers.

“Golf is a category that needs to be shaken up,” said John McGuire, the chief executive of Active Mind Technology, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It needs something new.”

There is plenty of sensor technology being applied to analyzing golf swings and helping golfers — that’s nothing new. But this device has a lot going for it. The product was designed by Yves Béhar, the creator of cool tech gear like the Jambox wireless speaker and the upcoming Ouya game console. It’s also being promoted and backed by pro golfers Graeme McDowell and Lee Westwood.

Tapping crowdfunding, Game Golf is raising up to $125,000 for the project over the next 30 days on Indiegogo. Game Golf uses accelerometers, gyroscopes, global navigation system (GPS), and near-field communications to track everything in a seamless fashion. It does not, however, measure the velocity of your swing and how good it is.

Perhaps the most important thing it tells you is the distance that you hit the ball with each club — a piece of data that most golfers never know with any precision, said John McGuire, chief executive and founder of Active Mind Technology, the company that makes the Game Golf device, in an interview with VentureBeat.

“We are doing what Nike FuelBand does for running,” McGuire said. “We want to change the sporting experience for amateur players.”

The company plans to launch the product in this summer. You can preorder it now.

“Game Golf not only gives everyone access to crucial data to dramatically improve your golf game and handicap, but it also makes playing more motivating, rewarding, social, and fun,” said McDowell, an investor and winner of the 2010 U.S. Open. “The product is extremely intuitive, doesn’t disrupt your game and is essential for any golfer looking to understand their game better, knock down their handicap, give themselves a competitive edge and compete with their friends and family across the globe.”

McDowell and Westwood have worn the devices in tournaments and are offering feedback to Active Mind Technology.

Béhar’s company, Fuseproject, designed the device and its different parts to be wearable. You can attach the main device to your belt, and then you screw the small red plugs into the top of your club grips. Those red plugs are NFC-enabled, so when you put them near the main device, it records which club you are using. Then it figures out how far you hit the ball as you pull out the next club to line up your next shot.

The device can upload the data via a universal serial bus (USB) to your computer. Or it can load the data via a wireless Bluetooth connection. It syncs the data to the cloud. On the iPhone, the app tracks, analyzes, and shares the data. Beyond shot distance, the app tells you your percentage of balls hit in the fairway, the greens you hit in regulation, and your putting performance.

The social part of the app is interesting. McDowell said that he can use the technology to share his best strokes with followers on Twitter and Facebook. A player can also participate in contests such as the “longest drive” on a hole. If you follow a friend, you’ll find out as soon as the player finished a round and what they scored. Friends can compete against each other long distance.

“The design of the Game Golf app and product has been closely integrated: a beautiful and dynamic presentation of play data, easy and fun ways to share, nondisruptive hardware and experience,” said Béhar, who is an investor in Active Mind Technology and is CEO of Fuseproject. “The design and user interface is crafted to deliver a 21st century experience of the game.”

The device can track two full rounds of tracking on one battery charge. Over time, Active Mind Technology plans to use the technology to measure and “gamify” other sports, McGuire said. Other sports that could benefit from the technology include soccer, cycling, swimming, and biking.

McGuire founded the company in 2010 when he moved from Ireland to San Francisco. The company has 20 employees, including some at a development center in Galway, Ireland. In addition to Behar and McDowell, investors include Chamath Paliphaitya, Jerry Yang, Ed Colligan, Hosain Rahman, Seagate Technology, ACT Ventures, Enterprise Equity, Cross-link Partners, Moroda Ventures, and 11-time world surf champion Kelly Slater.

McGuire has a background in software and behavioral technology as it applies to professional athletes. His aim is to help everyone improve their results by changing behavior. McGuire said his company has raised a seed round already and is in the midst of raising more money.

MapMyFitness rolled out an update today for its MVP premium subscribers that’s full of new and enhanced features.

MapMyFitness powers a suite of health and fitness tracking apps. Its flagship products, MapMyRun and MapMyRide, use built-in GPS technology so you can record your workout as well as search for new routes and monitor data like duration, pace, speed, elicitation, and calories burned. It saves all of this information so you can view your activity progress over time. Social elements provide motivation to stick to regimens and can make exercise more fun.

The business is based on a “freemium” model. The core set of features are free, but fitness enthusiasts can pay a monthly or annual fee for a more comprehensive experience. The MVP membership is $30 a year and comes without ads as well as tools like a Route Recommender, Customs Splits, Advanced Heart Rate, Training Plans, and Power Analytics.

“The new MVP is just a cleaner experience,” said CEO Robin Thurston in an interview. “People are gaining a fitness aptitude for data. They want content and analytics, and they are willing to pay for it if it will change their health outcomes and improve daily health.”

The Route Recommender is based on an algorithm that factors in desired length, travel mode, direction, rotations, and such and will autogenerate a customized route. For those trying to craft their own course, the app has a library of tools and icons to map it out. The heart rate tracking features are useful for people with target heart rate goals or restrictions, and the live tracking means friends can view each others’ activity. Thurston said that these product updates are a direct result of feedback from consumers about their needs.

MapMyFitness currently has 13 million users and hopes to grow to 20 million this year. Further updates are in the pipeline, including challenge/gamification features and more integrations with quantified self devices.

“There are encouraging trends around technology,” Thurston said. “People are adopting activity trackers and using mobile technology to be more active. This is a step in the right direction, but the next step is helping people change outcomes. The next five years in this space specifically is probably going to be one of the most exciting industries to be in, because of rapid change and disruption that is coming.”

MapMyFitness is headquartered in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 2007 by Thurston, who used to be a professional cyclist, and has raised $18.5 million to date. Competitors include Runkeeper, Skimble, and Endomondo. Read the press release.

Vivek Wadhwa is a vice president at Singularity University and a Washington Post columnist.

Last year I predicted that social media would lose its sizzle. Since then, the bubble has burst for companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. The tablet computer market, on the other hand, is booming, voice recognition is becoming a standard feature in new computing devices, and there have been, as I alluded to in 2012, notable cloud-computing failures andsecurity breaches in the past year.

I am glad to have been wrong about LinkedIn. It is a great company with a stellar management team. Also, tablet prices haven’t quite hit the $100 mark in the U.S., as I predicted they would. But I still anticipate they will, and likely very soon.

So, what else lies ahead for 2013? There is nothing as spectacular as the Facebook IPO, at least at this point, but expect gradual technology progressions of greater significance than have been seen in years past. The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama has outlined the trends in tech for the coming year — a year I believe will be one of transition for the sector.This year, expect tech innovators to set the stage to solve global problems, since technologies in fields such as medicine, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3D printing, and nanomaterials are advancing exponentially. Like the processors in our computers, they are becoming increasingly powerful while their price drops precipitously. This will enable startups to take on problems in fields such as energy, health, education, and security that only government and big research labs previously could.

Most recently, the big rewards have gone to startups developing relatively simple social media platforms and applications. In the upcoming era of exponential technologies, expect the rewards to go to players that solve big, global problems.

Here are the big innovation trends that I believe will gain traction in 2013.

Tablet explosion to computing revolution

The entry price of tablet computers will almost surely drop to under $100 in 2013 — especially if the rumored $99 Acer tablet gains traction this year, as I believe it will, or if theIndia Aakash tablet finally lives up to its potential. I also anticipate that the tablet price tag will keep dropping until it reaches close to zero over a 2-to-3 year period. We will reach the point where it makes sense for companies to give tablets away just as mobile carriers give phones away in exchange for plan subscriptions. More broadly, we can expect to see tablet computers almost everywhere in this decade—our kitchens, bathrooms, cars, supermarkets, schools and elevators.

Apple currently owns the high end of the market, of course, and I don’t expect cheap tablets to put any dent in the company’s sales this year. But, if Apple fails to keep innovating, the company will surely feel the pain in 2014 and beyond as Samsung continues to nip at its heels. The PC laptop vendors — Dell, HP and Lenovo, among others — should worry since tablets will continue to cannibalize their higher-priced products.

The biggest winner in this revolution will likely be Google, with its free Android operating system. Unsurprisingly, the loser will probably be Microsoft, which licenses its mobile operating system, Windows RT, for around $80 — more than the hardware will eventually cost. In the long term, expect the billions of new users that come online over the next few years to be doing Google searches and using Google’s applications.

The ‘quantified self’ goes mainstream and creates a new regulatory battlefield

We saw a trickle of sensor-based medical devices in 2012, but these were just the start of the “quantified self” movement. As sensors become smaller, more powerful, and cheaper, we will see many new types of devices that help us monitor our health. These will be embedded in our iPhone cases, bathroom scales, toothbrushes, and even in our jewelry.

In 2013, expect to be able to purchase sophisticated new devices like the AliveCor Heart Monitor, which I have been testing and the FDA has approved for use by licensed U.S. medical professionals. If I had a device like this 10 years ago, I may have been able to avoid the heart attack that I had.The device will cost $199 when prescribed by a physician. Today, we need physicians to analyze the data the device provides. But, given the rate at which technology is advancing, computers may be able to do a better job. Witness the way IBM’s Watson defeated Jeopardy champions. It had far more data available to it.

Eventually, I foresee cloud-based systems that have access to the latest medical knowledge and to data from hundreds of millions of people analyzing medical data. I would trust these systems more than I trust my cardiologist, and the app to access these will be available anytime and as often as I need it.Even before we reach this stage, consumers should be allowed to purchase these devices off the shelf to see and analyze their own medical data. This is where the battle lines will increasingly be drawn between technologists and regulators.

Users will begin to demand greater control of their own data and more ways to monitor it in order to improve their lives. That means, in the coming year, one should expect to see the regulatory battles over these types of technologies become more frequent and heated.

Pages: 1 2

Seismic shifts are occurring in the health industry. Policy is changing at the federal level, cultural attitudes about wellness are evolving, and new forms of technology are transforming the way patients relate to their bodies and the way clinicians practice medicine. One of the most important trends to watch is the growth of the digital health sector.

Today, health technology accelerator Rock Health released its 2012 Year-End Funding Report. The findings indicate that digital health technology will continue to thrive and become an increasingly significant part of health care industry, as well as the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Venture capital funding of digital health grew dramatically in 2012. Investors funneled 46 percent more money and made 56 percent more deals in health care in 2012 than in 2011, with the cumulative funding totaling $1.4 billion last year. This sharp incline contrasts with declining investment in traditional healthcare fields, like biotechnology, life sciences, and medical devices.

The most common theme for investment was health consumer engagement, which represented $237 million in funding. Navigating the tangled health care industry can be daunting. These companies help consumers figure out which care options are best for them and connect them with well-matched providers. Interest in these services is exploding among consumers and investors alike as the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) looms closer. Of the five largest deals, which represented more than 20 percent of the entire year’s funding, four were in this area.

“There are approximately 45 million to 50 million uninsured people today,” said Rock Health Chief Strategy Officer Malay Gandhi in an interview. “As we move towards health reform, the biggest impact will be in the insurance market — between 60 and 80 percent of these people will have moved into the insurance market in 2014, depending on the study. There is going to be a marketplace for retail health care, and consumers are going to need help with their purchases and decisions. Venture firms are making investments this year for 2014.”

In addition to health care reform, Gandhi also said that mobile technology is causing consumers to take a greater stake in their physical health, leading investors to take a greater stake in products that help them do that. About $150 million in venture funding went toward personal health tools and tracking last year. The quantified self movement is taking off as people are scoop up devices like the Nike FuelBand, Jawbone, and FitBit.

A number of apps also help people gain perspective on their physical well being and live healthier lives. Whether they provide healthy recipe ideas, detail workout regimens, or create social networks to reinforce positive habits, the companies that make these apps are instrumental in preventing illness and epidemics like obesity. Furthermore, people with chronic illnesses like diabetes can use consumer-facing technology to track their bodily functions and stay on course with treatment plans.

The third most common zone of investment are tools that capture and track clinical health records, which generated $108 million in deal flow. Health care organizations like insurance companies, clinics, and hospitals traditionally have gross inefficiencies in how they run, operating on heavily bureaucratic systems that are time-consuming, expensive, and at times, life threatening. Digital health companies that target the enterprise are creating more effective infrastructure by developing systems for electronic health records, timetabling and scheduling software, and communication tools.

When analyzing this data, Rock Health only included companies that received more than $2 million in venture funding. The median amount of all digital health deals came in at $6 million, nestled between a median $3.8 million for first rounds and $8.4 million for second rounds of financing. Castlight Health’s $100 million Series D round in May was the largest deal of the year, raised to grow its platform where employees compare the pricing of their healthcare options. Rock Health also found that there is a strong funnel of deals leading to potential IPOs, and rumors have Practice Fusion, Castlight, and ZocDoc as the most likely candidates to go public.

The data reveals that while venture firms are interested in health startups, they are not filling their portfolios with them. Of the 179 organizations that made digital health investments, only 35 made more than one deal, and only eight made three or more. Qualcomm Ventures led the pack with six health investments in 2012. Interestingly, many of the most active venture outlets in digital health are strategic investors, as opposed to traditional venture capital. Gandhi attributes this to the healthcare industry’s commitment to changing from within.

Overall, 2013 stands to be a successful year for digital health startups and their investors, not to mention the consumers who are gaining more and more control over their health.

Check out the slideshow featuring the report’s highlights: 2012 Digital Health Funding Report by @Rock_Health from Rock Health

Ever since the iPod Nano was slightly less Nano’d just a few months ago, there’s been increased speculation about an iWatch to replace it. Now there’s chatter about a new device — an iWatch, perhaps —  from Apple for specifically that purpose.

Nano is Apple’s smallest iPod with a screen, bigger than only the Shuffle, and the sixth generation has been used extensively as a watch with the simple addition of a wristband. At 1.55-inches square, the Nano was perhaps a little awkward but an excellent beginning — and perhaps a precursor — to the Pebble smart watch.

That’s no longer an option with the seventh generation iPod Touch, which sports a 2.5-inch multitouch screen and a longer, rectangular body.

Cue iWatch?

The speculation is that Apple will be releasing a product in the next six months, possibly with an Intel chip, that communicates with your smartphone via Bluetooth. If so, it needs to be much more than a watch, and much more than a way to communicate with the device that is already just a few inches away in your pocket.

In other words, it needs to be a personal quantification device for the masses.

There are currently 505 tools listed in the Guide to Self-Tracking Tools on Quantified Self. Jawbone’s UP, Fitbit’s err bit, Nike’s FuelBand, the Basis Band, the Zeo “personal sleep coach,” the Stresswatch, the Adidas miCoach and dozens more are devices built to measure, track, and encourage you to modify fitness activities.

This is more than a fad — it’s a movement. And while smartphones like Apple’s iPhone are often components of these systems, they’re just one component in an ecosystem that includes sensors, apps, online social experiences, and analytics. Apple could be so much more, if it wanted to play in this market.

As The Next Web mentions, 2013 could be the year when wearable computing leaves the geek and enthusiast community. And isn’t popularizing and improving emerging technologies what Apple does best?

The iWatch is just a rumor right now, but I’m hoping it’s more … much more.

photo credit: griffintech via photopin cc

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.

Tony Post, the former president and CEO of Vibram, has left to start his own company. This new endeavor is called Topo Athletic, and it’s backed by $5 million from Norwest Venture Partners.  

Vibram was a pioneer in the minimalist footwear movement. During his reign as Vibram’s leader, Post took the company from two guys with a crazy idea to a $170 million empire that changed the way people thought about athletic shoes.

“I’ve been in the footwear industry for 25 years,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “In 2006 I launched FiveFingers without any fanfare at all, and it grew rapidly. We created a different way for people to think about footwear based on the belief that the body’s own natural mechanics could be leveraged. The new concept is based on that idea — it is focused on lightweight footwear and targets runners and functional fitness trainers, like Cross-Fit.”

Many folks in the technology industry sport these lightweight, barely there shoes, including founder of Google, Sergey Brin. With the rise of the “quantified self” movement and the popularity of devices like the Fitbit and Jawbone Up, the market is growing right now for technology (in any form) that enhances user health.

The minimalist footwear movement is all about amplication as opposed to modification. These lightweight shoes don’t fix or change the way people train; they work in concert with the body to create synergy between “shoe, foot, and movement.” It is a fast-growing segment within the athletic footwear market, which is partly what drew Norwest Venture Partners to make this rather uncharacteristic investment.

General partner at NVP Jon Kossow met Post a few years ago and became interested in his vision. When he decided to form his own brand, Kossow was excited by the investment opportunity.

“Post is a visionary,” said Kossow during a phone chat. “He has an incredible reputation within the footwear industry and has a bit of ‘midas touch’. He has the unique and proven ability to not only identify unique consumer insights, but then design and manufacture a product to address those insights, execute, and build a business accordingly.”

Topo Athletic will debut its first products at the Outdoor Retailer winter market in January. Until then, Post and co are keeping the details of this “cutting-edge performance technology” under wraps. This first round of investment from NVP will help bring the product to market.

What’s the key to unlocking human potential? Tony Stubblebine, a first-hand witness to the coming-of-age moments of some of today’s most successful entrepreneurs, has always sought an answer to that very question. Now Stubblebine seeks to answer that question for everyone, through Lift, his one-year-old, four-person startup centered around goal-tracking.

“We have a big mission,” Stubblebine told me in a sit-down last week. “We want to make willpower obsolete. We want to have a giant impact on human potential.”

Mind you, Stubblebine told me this while in the midst of celebrated entrepreneur genius. Sitting in a private office at 800 Market Street, home to avant-garde incubator and app house Obvious Corporation, Stubblebine and I were in the presence of Twitter’s famous founders, Evan Williams and Christopher Isaac “Biz” Stone.

Stubblebine is a 34-year-old entrepreneur who’s achieved the type of moderate success most in the area can only hope for. As a part of the original Odeo team — Odeo was the podcasting service that eventually pivoted to become Twitter — Stubblebine has had plenty of time to think about human potential, and watch as others around him achieved greatness.

Colleagues from Odeo, including Ev, Biz, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey (Stubblebine was his boss) and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom (who interned at Odeo), have gone on to become household names in technology. Stubblebine, a well-known name in San Francisco, isn’t there yet, but he is on his way to becoming a better version of himself.

Stubblebine explained to me how the idea for Lift came out of his lifelong interest in helping people become better versions of themselves.

“I’ve always wondered how various athletes became great,” he said. “Kevin Durant. That’s a guy that spends a lot of time in the gym, and it’s not just the time he spends in the gym, it’s the actual things that he’s practicing while he’s there. There are other gym rats. What is it that made him a great athlete?”

“It’s the same with Silicon Valley,” Stubblebine continued. “What is it about those three [Jack, Biz, Ev] that made them so successful? They have a quality; they just pay attention to doing the right thing.”

So Stubblebine, whose better self is a fitter, healthier, nicer, more articulate version of himself, set out to create a system to help others become the best possible versions of themselves.

It’s such a lofty goal that it’s made to look almost unachievable by the simple app that Stubblebine and team are now readying for release.

Lift, a light application for iPhone slated for August release, does little more than help a person track personal goals of their choosing by checking-in to them (and adding a free-form note, if desired) and getting calendar graphs that show progress. Each goal also has a community of people who can leave encouraging messages for each other.

There’s no technology here that will blow your mind. Nor is there a glossy, you-must-touch-me design to behold. No, Lift is so pared-down, so limited in function, that it seems elementary.

But Lift, in its simplicity, could be the tool that wins people over because of its ease of use. Stubblebine compared Lift’s simplistic philosophy for goal-achieving to Twitter, with its 140-character approach to messaging. Twitter, in its earliest days, was often written off and ridiculed for being pointless.

“If you make it simple enough that anyone can understand, then people can keep it in their head as a tool they can use,” he said.

The bigger idea is to make Lift a ubiquitous support system for goals big and small. Dentists, for instance, are always encouraging their patients to floss more, and even providing them with free floss to do so. Lift, said Stubblebine, could become an important part of this process. In his vision, a dentist, in addition to offering advice and floss, would suggest the Lift application to get patients to floss more. The patient can then return in a few months time and proudly show off his progress. (Fun fact: 20 percent of Lift users check in to “flossing.”)

“Lift is a tool that anyone can hand out and say, ‘this how you achieve your goal,’” said Stubblebine. “‘I told you what to do. Here’s a support system for it.’”

Lift’s retention numbers are also quite high, showing that its approach to creating a tool people will actually use may be working. Fifty percent of Lift users who check in once are still using the application one month later, Stubblebine said.

Obvious though the idea behind Lift may be, the startup will face an uphill battle in finding a place on iPhone owners’ devices. Health and fitness apps litter the App Store, each fighting for recognition, and all screaming for attention by promising better looks, a perfect body, or the ideal food plan.

That’s not the Lift way.

“I think a lot of people are … in this space for health reasons, saying, ‘We really want the world to be healthier.’ We’re … sitting above that,” Stubblebine said.

“I just want you to be happier with who are. If you want to be healthier, good for you. If you want to get a promotion at work, good for you. If you just want to be a better, more positive person in society, good for you. We’re really non specific about what your goals are. I feel like Lift captures that aspiration of anything can uplift you.”

Lift currently has a small beta group of 100 users, which includes mostly friends and family members. The company will release the app on iPhone in August.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

Stealthy San Francisco-based startup Lift has today ever-so-slightly pulled back the curtain to reveal a snippet of its master plan to change the way people achieve their goals.

Lift, as a refresher, is the tiny company that made a big splash last August when it came to light that Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone were backing the application through Obvious Corporation, the boys’ post-Twitter app house and New-Age venture fund for spawning projects that make the world a better pace. But, until today, little has been known about Lift, save its mission to “unlock human potential.”

As it turns out, Lift is an iPhone application, now slated for August release, that borrows concepts from the Quantified Self movement to help people track, analyze, and achieve goals, Lift CEO and co-founder Tony Stubblebine said in a blog post. The iPhone app isn’t designed for any one type of goal, but it has been used in its beta period for self-improvement in health, fitness, productivity, happiness, and relationship areas.

The company’s end game is to eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals, Stubblebine said. “Imagine smooth, fun, optimized, self-reinforcing paths for every aspiration … We think we can turn chores into positive draws.”

It’s starting point, however, is a simplistic habit-tracking app to help people develop mindfulness in the areas where they want to improve. Users set or share goals, track their progress, and get support from others with the same goals. The app shucks gamification elements and instead includes two feedback loops — visualized progress and support from others — to keep people motivated.

Lift sounds fairly rudimentary and will compete with an abundance of lifestyle and productivity apps on the market, but perhaps it will offer the same variety of approachable simplicity that helped Twitter take off. And, according to Stubblebine, the app works for even the most mundane, but still important, activities.

“Yesterday, 2 out of 5 Lift users tracked their flossing (including me),” he said. “That’s an example of a supposedly trivial, fundamental habit that everyone’s been told to pick up and that most people will say they wish they did. But flossing has never had proper support (just bi-annual guilt from your dentist).”

Photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It may be time to sack your therapist. The researchers conducting the world’s first clinical study on the use of smartphone apps to treat depression have given VentureBeat a preview of the results. 73.5 percent of depressed participants who used an application called Viary, were no longer considered to be depressed by the end of the study.

Depression is a common and costly problem in developed countries. 15 to 17 percent of the population will suffer from a depressive disorder at some stage in their lives and depression is expected to be the highest disease burden, or the health problem with the greatest negative impact on society in terms of financial cost and mortality, by the year 2030.

81 people participated in the study over 8 weeks. Participants had to be at least mildly depressed, meaning they scored 0-13 on the Beck Depression Inventory or BDI-II scale, one of the most widely accepted measurements of depression, to qualify for the study. Most of the participants were at least moderately depressed (20–28 BDI-II), with a mean score of 25 BDI-II.

Participants were split into 2 groups. The first group used the behavior-change application Viary while the second group used a mindfulness app not specifically designed to treat depression. Each weekend participants wrote about the highs and lows of their week and the only contact with a mental health professional was a short response written by a psychology student. Treatment therefore mainly involved usage of the assigned applications.

The Viary application prompted users to engage in approximately 100 behaviors known to help relieve depression and tracked their progress. These behaviors were designed to help the depressed person add structure to his everyday life by doing simple tasks like getting out of bed in the morning when the alarm rings or cooking a meal, and to increase social contact and participation in novel activities. The mean value for the group using Viary was 25 on BDI-II before the treatment started and 13 when the treatment concluded.

The second group used The Mindfulness app from MindApps which is loaded with audio tracks that guide the user towards developing greater mindfulness. Users could track their progress by how much time they spent listening to various tracks. 53.1 percent of users from this group were also relieved of their depression over the course of the study. The conclusion of the researchers is that the improvement in the mindfulness group was explained partly by the support given by the psychology student and also the fact that the group was prompted to use the mindfulness app everyday. Although the mindfulness app did not directly target depression, practicing mindfulness regularly has been shown to improve mental health.

Viary was created by a Swedish startup called Hoa’s Toolshop. The Hoa of the title is a clinical psychologist who spent a year on Tokyo in the pre-iPhone era and saw the degree to which mobile phones had been integrated into everyday life in Japan. He spotted the potential of apps to map personal values or objectives on to concrete behaviours, in other words to bring we do into line with what we say.

Let’s say you you want to improve the way you communicate at work, what behaviors should you engage in to help you to achieve this objective?  ”Psychologists are experts in this kind of ‘A/B testing for the real world’”, says Hoa.

Viary is aimed at coaches, therapists, HR managers and others involved in personal development to help them to track progress between appointments. Clients like it too. “People like to gather data which makes their own development concrete,” Hoa explains.

Viary can be used to encourage and track any kind of behavior, hence its more recent application to depression. Hoa is also working on an application for consumers which lets them experiment with how behaviors they engage in during the day effect their sleep. 

Hoa’s Tool Shop was founded in 2011, is based in Stockholm, has 4 employees (3 of which are psychologists) and is privately funded.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Like nerve endings which translate senses into electrical impulses in your nervous system, sensors can translate the physical world into the digital. In the process, they can help humans become more aware of ourselves.

The “quantified self” is an increasingly popular term. It means using algorithms to correlate all these sensor data, and provide valuable information for better living. In an earlier article “Internet of Things: Not Just a Fund Raising Concept Now,” we talked about sensor technology as one of the fundamental drivers for the development of the “internet of things.” Key factors for sensor technology adoption depend on the maturity of the technology, cost, and most importantly, experience. Innovative application of existing sensors is also an important factor in the scaling of the industry.

In this article, we will introduce a few interesting life science sensor technologies and their “quantified self” applications. Some of them are still in research labs, while others are ready to go for the market.

The science of breathing

However, we are most excited about newer technologies that go beyond “what we are doing” and dive deeper into how we relate to the world.  The Calming Technology Lab at Stanford University was founded on a simple premise: to reduce the stress in our always-connected world.  They asked: “How can we use new technologies such as the quantified self to bring more ‘calm’ into the world?”

Led by Neema Moraveji, their breakthrough project involves using breathing sensors to obtain a user’s breathing pattern and extract its relationship with stress levels. Initial papers published by the lab have used breathing-based feedback to increase productivity and reduce stress of office workers.  They believe this model can be extended, leading to a systematic reduction in stress and improved health. Moreover, ancient art forms focused around meditation, such as Taiqi, martial arts and Yoga, may get scientific explanations for their results.

Sweat sensors for traditional Chinese medicine

Chinese medicine has been a mysterious system of knowledge for thousands of years. No one can really explain clearly what it is, but the treatments do deliver results. We don’t want to dig into its theory bases here, however, the diagnosis methods used to tell a patient’s treatment status are interesting. Sweat is one of them. After a patient has taken medication, the amount and timing of her sweat are valuable information for doctors to tell if the medication has the expected impact. However, such readings have depended on the intuition of the doctor, limiting the impact to those who can access an increasingly small number of skilled practitioners.

Engineers at GuoHao, a Beijing-based sensor technology company, have developed sensors to monitor sweat for medication analysis. Doctors can, for example, remotely access a patient’s account, look at his sweat records, and decide the subsequent treatment. Although this technology faces obstacles in user education for adoption, it holds the potential of bringing traditional medicine to a broader audience with greater results.

“Tattoo” for non-piercing glucose testing

People with type I diabetes must prick their fingers several times a day to test their blood sugar level. Though the pain is minor, the chore interferes with daily life. Researchers in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering have been working on a new type of sensor to detect glucose levels without the need of finger pricks. The sensing system consists of a “tattoo” of nanoparticles designed to detect glucose, injected below the skin. A device similar to a wristwatch would be worn over the tattoo, displaying the patient’s glucose levels. The “tattoo” would last for a specified length of time, probably six months, before needing to be refreshed.

The sensor is based on carbon nanotubes wrapped in a polymer that is sensitive to glucose concentrations. When this sensor encounters glucose, the nanotubes fluoresce, which can be detected by shining near-infrared light on them. Although this technology is still years away from human trials, it may soon start trials in animals. If this technology appears in real products, people will be better able to prevent diabetes caused by irregular daily activities such as taking meals, drinks, and medications, through instant glucose level notifications.

Brainwave monitoring and meditation lights

What are you thinking? Are you nervous? Modern technologies can help you easily become a “mind-reader,” and brainwave technology is one of them. NeuroSky, a U.S.-based EEG chipset company, has been focusing on spreading brainwave sensors to the mass market. The company has applied brainwave technology into various industries, such as sports training, education, and entertainment. In recent activities, they translated brainwaves to a hardware LED light. Users can see their brainwave status through the colors of the light. For example, your state of mind will be indicated as “Peace & Soothing” when your brainwave light is blue. Yoga exercisers can use it as a tool to indicate meditation status. “You can easily control your stress by adjusting your breaths,” says Priti, a 20-year yoga practitioner and teacher. “I am happy to see my light keep blue, this can certainly help bring meditation to a scientific level.”

Other sensors for increasing self-awareness

We see many exciting sensor technologies to improve life science intelligence. Some of them help explore the mysteries of the human body, some fundamentally change the way people obtain their own information, while others apply commonly-used sensors to innovative usage. For example, Brainpage has been working on a PC/Mac-based application to help professionals prevent repetitive stress injuries (RSI). The Anti-RSI program includes a client software and graphing tools. Through analysis of users’ keyboard and mouse usage, the client application will remind people to take breaks when work intensity could cause RSI. The program also allow users to understand their performance through Web graphs, for example, help users find out their professional skill level comparing to other people.

We believe that in the near future, innovative sensor technologies can greatly help humans understand more about ourselves. We hope to see more of such these intriguing projects happening, and more importantly, put to practical use for better living.

This article originally appeared on TechNode, a VentureBeat editorial partner based in China. It was written by TechNode Guest Editor Dr. Wenzhe Zhou, co-founder of Brainpage, which is a big data processing and analysis startup, focused on creating a cloud-based engine for time series data and sensors. The company’s Hadoop-based service provides developers and industry partners easy-to-use, scalable and flexible database and analysis solutions.

Top photo: Sergio Alvarez/Flickr

• For instance, he’s been recording every single keystroke he’s made since 2002, totalling over 100 million (including 7 million hits upon the backspace key).
• He’s got a complete archive of all of his email and calendar events going back to 1989.
• He’s got 1.7 million files in his filesystem, with backups going as far back as 1980.
• He’s kept and scanned (and in many cases OCR’ed) over 230,000 pieces of paper.

But rather than just pile up all this data, Wolfram has also plotted it, revealing some interesting patterns in his work. For instance, like many of us, he’s pretty much sending email almost every hour he’s awake, so plotting email timestamps by hour of the day reveals his sleep patterns.

He can plot the first appearance of new Mathematica functions in his emails, letting him get a rough idea of how creative he’s been over the years.

He can plot how many hours a day he spends on the phone, and how often those phone meetings tend to start on time (answer: quite often, when they’re calls with people outside his company, but not very often with internal meetings).

I’m not entirely sure what I’d do with this much data, but I am certain of one thing: I want tools to do the same thing. To heck with entering my daily calories and workouts manually, I want to track every single keystroke I make, and use that data for … something. It’s one of the most intriguing and obsessive applications of the “quantified self” theme, or what Wolfram calls “personal analytics,” that I’ve seen yet.

I hope Wolfram follows up his impressive post with another one describing the tools he’s used to collect and analyze all this personal data.

The round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership along with existing investors. The company’s product is one more example of the “quantified self” trend, where people can gain self-knowledge through quantification of the things they do in life.

About 25 million people live with diabetes in the U.S. People with diabetes can’t properly process sugar their blood because their bodies can’t make enough insulin, which bonds with the sugar and turns it into fat. Patients need to inject themselves with synthetic insulin several times a day to keep their blood sugar under control. If they have too little or too much sugar in their blood, the results can be incapacitating or life threatening.

Many people use glucose meters to monitor their sugar intake. The Glooko MeterSync Cable plugs into most standard self-monitoring blood glucose meters and then syncs the data to a Glooko Logobook app on iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) devices.

With the app, diabetes patients can review a digital logbook of readings, review their daily blood sugar levels, annotate them and share the results with a doctor. The product debuted in November.

Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and managing partner of The Social+Capital Partnership, has joined Glooko’s board. Other investors include Bill Campbell, Vint Cerf, Judy Estrin, Andy Hertzfeld, Venky Harinarayan of Cambrian Ventures and Russell Hirsch of Prospect Venture Partners; and Xtreme Labs, a Canadian mobile applications development firm.

“Proactive and ongoing self-management of one’s health can now be a reality using mobile devices and well-designed software,” said Palihapitiya.  “Glooko has made important progress in helping individuals better manage one of the most pervasive diseases of our generation.”

Glooko is also releasing a new version of the Glooko Logbook app that supports Bayer’s Breeze 2 meter. It has a real-time food database, a 30-day logbook, and availability in Canada. The app is available on the iTunes App Store and the Glooko MeterSync cable can be purchased from Amazon.com.

Yogen Dalal, Glooko co-founder and chairman, said the company was able to deliver its solution in a year with just $1 million in seed capital. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Glook was founded in 2010 by Dalal, Sunny Madra and Anita Matthew. The company has 15 employees.

Competitors are makers of software and cables from the glucose meter vendors. But Glooko says it supports seven different meters, has a good user interface, and gets rid of the manual data entry of results by replacing that with an automatic logbook.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

As everything analog shifts to digital, we can collect a huge amount of data about ourselves. As I noted in our earlier story, the trend was spearheaded by researchers who wanted a “quantified self,” or self-knowledge through numbers that measure things such as how long we sleep or how many stairs we can climb in a day. Most people don’t have the patience to sift through all the data that they could collect about themselves. But a number of new devices are making it easier to do, bringing us the opportunity both to improve our lives, have more fun, and think more about privacy issues.

This shift to quantified self gadgets is also coming with a change in attitudes about privacy, or at least it seems that way. The technology is racing ahead, before we really decide whether we prefer personalization over privacy. Webcams, camera phones, and motion-sensing systems are just the beginning of this technological explosion. Used in conjunction with the cloud, or web-connected data centers, the quantified self movement promises to capture a huge amount of information about ourselves and contribute considerably to the Big Data infrastructure that enterprises are creating to safely store all of this information. In that sense, the Quantified Self really enlists just about every technology company imaginable in the service of recording our daily lives.

For the narcissists among us, this is like heaven. WordPress.com, which hosts our VentureBeat blog, reported that in 2011, I wrote 1,787 posts consisting of 1,097,692 words. Now I know my goal for this year is to do 1,788 posts with 1,097,692 words. However, it was worth noting that I was the least efficient writer at VentureBeat, with 614 words per post and the least traffic per post compared to my fellow writers, who were less wordy and had higher average traffic per post.

A lot of this trend started in video games, which have taken it to an extreme. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, for instance, I know everything about my performance in multiplayer combat since the game launched on Nov. 8. I have played the game for 27 hours and 39 minutes and achieved a multiplayer rank of Lieutenant Colonel II, or 58. I’m about 72 percent of the way through the multiplayer ladder and have 80 wins and 120 losses. In the multiplayer combat matches, I have 1,375 kills and 3,213 deaths, for a 0.427 kill/death ratio. I’ve had 93 headshots and 366 assists with a 9 percent accuracy rate.

To my non-gaming friends, my dedication is impressive. Of course, other players know just how bad I am. My total score is 162,490, which places me at No. 5,518,786 in the overall Call of Duty multiplayer universe. On average, I score 826 points a match, which is kind of pathetic compared to my performance in Call of Duty Black Ops from last year. But that game had some much easier ways to kill, such as the remote-controlled exploding car, rewarded after I could get just two kills in a row.

In the virtual world of the game, it’s easy to record digital stats. But with the proliferation of new devices that measure non-computer activities, we can measure so much more. The history of this behavior goes as far back as 1955 to Jerry Davidson, who has obsessively recorded his life. Kevin Kelly blogs about The Quantified Self and all things related to self-surveillance.

“Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved,” Kelly wrote. “So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. We welcome tools that help us see and understand bodies and minds so that we can figure out what humans are here for.”

Alexandra Carmichael, co-founder of CureTogether, records 40 things about her daily life, including “sleep, morning weight, daily caloric intake, mealtimes, mood, day of menstrual cycle, sex, exercise, and other things.

Now I can move on to more important measurements such as how much activity I engage in during the day. The Striiv “personal trainer in my pocket” tells me I am walking an average of 9,968 steps in a day, or about 4.7 miles. I burn 1,053 calories in a day for about 106 minutes in the day. That earns me 40,425 points in a day which I can use to play the Striiv game and motivate myself. My personal best was 17,983 steps in a day, or 7.8 miles, walked at CES. I burned 1,806 calories that day. I can compete against other Striiv users through daily challenges, which “gamifies” the exercise activity by making it into a social competition.

You can get more information back from the Basis Band from Basis Science. Basis gives you a wrist band that tracks your heart rate, skin temperature, ambient temperature, and your galvanic skin response (GSR, or how much you are sweating). The sweat and the heart rate gives the added information about how stressed out you are. If you match this up to your Google Calendar, you could figure out which person stresses you out the most or how much your heart rate leaps when you are stuck in a traffic jam.

Basis also has a web site that you can use to see the results of your daily activities, such as calories burned, the number of steps you have taken, the hours of sleep, and the points you have earned. All of that data can be quantified and analyzed over time on the Basis web site. You get positive reinforcement in the form of points for your activities.

“There is a lot of interesting stuff happening in the quantified-self movement,” said Jeff Holove, chief executive of Basis Science, in an interview. “It is understanding ourselves better and measuring ourselves better and, in the case of health, using that data to inform our decisions on how we live our lives. We are gathering scientifically meaningful data and then translating it to a much broader audience than the people who have the knowledge and stamina to deal with lots of data.”

Basis boils the metrics down to things that can be easily understood, though “quantified selfers” can dig into the data further if they wish. Nike, FitBit, Jawbone and a number of other companies have similar devices. As far as self-measurement goes, Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system is pretty good at capturing your whole body. Bodymetrics (pictured above) uses Kinect to understand your body shape so it can tell you where clothes will be tight or loose on your form as you go virtual shopping.

With sleep monitors like Gear4′s upcoming Sleep Clock (pictured left), you don’t even have to wear a wrist band to get more information about yourself. The Sleep Clock will use a Doppler radar to detect your breathing and movement during the night.

It can calculate the exact number of minutes you slept in a night, how many minutes it took to fall asleep, and when is the ideal time to wake you up. It can tell the difference between when you are in a deep sleep, when it isn’t good to wake you up, to a light sleep. After a year of such data, it will be much easier to wake up at exactly the lightest point in your sleep cycle.

There are downsides to knowing so much about ourselves. The problem is very similar to people “oversharing” information about themselves on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. If the federal authorities got hold of your GSR data, they could figure out if you were lying during an interview, since GSR can be used in lie detector tests.

George Orwell, the author of 1984, the seminal novel about Big Brother watching you, couldn’t have planned a better way to capture everything that we do in a day. But because of the potential benefits, many people seem eager to be measured, as long as their privacy is protected. The space where you can operate privately is becoming more and more constrained.

If you want to fly, for instance, the Transportation Security Adminstration airport scanners can now collect extremely detailed imagery of what you look like under your clothes. The full-body scanner data is supposed to be used for safety purposes only, but it’s certainly spooky. But wouldn’t it be great if the TSA could tell you, “you’re thinner this time.”

Steve Jobs, the former chief of Apple, created some of the key technology for monitoring our lives with the iPhone and the iPad, which can measure our location, our movements, our cell phone usage, and other deeply personal kinds of data. Yet he railed against reporters who invaded his privacy by disclosing information about his deteriorating health.

Will Wright, the world famous game designer who created The Sims and SimCity, believes that all of the Big Data collected about our personal lives can be used to create new kinds of mobile-based games which he calls “personal gaming.” Personal gaming is a game that is customized for each individual player, taking into account real-life situations surrounding the player that make the game more interesting to that player.

“How can we make a system that understands enough about you and gives you situational awareness?” Wright said in a recent interview. “It could take into account what time of day it is, where you are, how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map.”

Although he realizes many people are guarded about privacy, he notes that the younger generation is more comfortable sharing information about themselves. And they will willingly share it if they could be virtually guaranteed a great deal of entertainment in return. If you entice people with enough game-oriented entertainment, they won’t mind sharing that information, he said. Wright has created a company called HiveMind to execute on this vision.

“It blurs entertainment, lifestyle, and personal tools,” Wright said. “With that data, the world and the opportunities for entertainment within it become more visible to you.”

“If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life,” Wright said. “How do we get you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it?”

[body map image credit: thegood; TSA image credit: Palm Beach Post]

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Gear4 might have a solution with its Sleep Clock, which uses an iPhone app, a dock, and radar (!) to sense your sleep pattern and wake you up at the moment when you’re at the lightest point in your sleep cycle.

The Raleigh, N.C. company has made an app and sleep monitor hardware that uses sensors to detect, track, and interpret your sleep patterns. Once it develops a profile of your sleep habits, it can then make recommendations, said Victor Marks, senior market development manager at the company, in an interview.

Gear4 is known as a maker of accessories for mobile devices. Its new Sleep Clock is a dock for your iPhone that works together with an app on the phone. Aside from showing the time, the Sleep Clock uses a doppler radar to sense your body’s breathing and movements. If you wake up in the middle of the night and turn over, the Sleep Clock records that, too.

The next morning, you may not remember that moment, but it may tell you that you were restless. On the iPhone, you can look at your entire sleep pattern, including how long it took you to fall asleep and how many minutes exactly you slept. It can show you how much of your sleep was deep and how much was not as restful.

The Sleep Clock fits into a wave of new products related to research on “the Quantified Self,” where researchers measure every possible thing they can about a person in the hopes of gaining larger insights. A slew of products, such as the Fitbit and Striiv pedometers, Jawbone’s Up and Lark’s sleep monitor/alarm, are aimed at making it easier for people to measure themselves in order to get healthier and sleep better.

The app is free, but the Sleep Clock sells for $199. It will go on sale soon. We caught up with Marks at the Showstoppers party in Las Vegas on Tuesday. See our video interview with Marks below.

We talked to Wright about HiveMind earlier this week in an exclusive interview, but we also thought it would be great to show you Wright’s own words, as he has a HiveMind like no one else. Here’s an edited transcript.

VentureBeat: Why don’t you start by telling me about where you are with HiveMind?

Will Wright: We have been exploring all this stuff with the Stupid Fun Clubs, and we really started diving into this idea over six months ago. And really this has to do with where gaming is going in the future. This is one of these things where we want it to be totally focused and have it be something that we can scale up in a big way. We are actually planning to launch this as a separate company entirely, a spin out from the Stupid Fun Club.

VB: Tell us about it.

WW: The gist of it is, we are trying to do what I am kind of calling personal gaming. We have had different eras in gaming like console gaming and social gaming. This isn’t really a platform-based concept, although a lot of  it will be happening on mobile devices. A big part of it is how can we learn enough about the player to start crafting games about their real life. Rather than craft a game like FarmVille for players to learn in play, we learn about you and your routines and incorporate that into a form of game play. Rather than put you in a fictional sand box, how do we make a game about the things that you do all the time?

It is something that is with you all the time, especially with your real life, almost like you are Sim. Your regular routines, your locations, your friends can all be incorporated into a form of game play. And a big part of this really, I think, is how do we make reality more interesting to you. What we are saying is, how do make a game that gets you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it? And so we use reality as the basis of the game play and a lot of these opportunities that surround you.

I had this epiphany about a year ago. I was in Burbank and I was waiting to give a talk and I was about an hour early and I walked  down the street. There was like this old fifties diner. I had an hour to kill, so I just walked  down there because I liked the sign. In the parking lot were all these guys with really cool sports cars. They were sitting on lawn chairs. I asked what they were doing, and it turned out that the last Friday of the month, these guys would get together in the parking lot and just bring their cars and sit and talk about cars. And I love cars, so I had a great time just walking around talking to these guys looking at their cars. And it occurred to me later that my life is probably surrounded with possibilities like this, opportunities that I am just not aware of. There is this opportunity space that surrounds me. If I understood the things that were accessible to me, if I knew about these events, my life would probably be a lot more interesting.

And that’s kind of the concept here. How do we expose you to these events? How can we make a system that understands enough about you and gives you really deep situational awareness? It could take into account what time of day it is, where you are, how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map.

These things might be of tremendous interest to you. It might be an event, it might be a place, its might be some historical footnote, it might be some person that you went to high school with. Whatever it is, all these things that you trip across serendipitously — how can we make a system? All of these things are very different dimensions that this kind of matchmaking would occur through. Are you following me so far?

VB: Yeah. It’s interesting.

WW: Another way to look at this is like in mapping software. Google Maps will show you where are in two dimensions, and it can show you what’s near by geographically. But when you think about the things that really kind of moderate your interest or your accessibility or availability to different experiences or opportunities, there are a lot more dimensions to that map. There’s probably at least like 50 dimensions in that map. And those dimensions would be things like your interests, your social network, the time of day. All of the factors that I talked about you can envision as other dimensions on a much higher dimensional map.

And so one of the things we want to do is be able to triangulate a player in those 50 dimensions plus have a deep map of the world on these dimensions. And there will be a lot of data in there that’s not even up on the cloud yet. We want to build a game and entertainment activities that can actually help us build a 50-dimensional map and locate the players in it. And then we use that opportunity space for really interesting new forms of entertainment. It might blur entertainment, lifestyle and personal tools. With that data, the world and the opportunities for entertainment become more visible to you. A part of this is really getting a deep relationship with the user, really understanding a lot about them and even designing games to where we are actually specifically trying to learn aspects of the user that are not really captured by anybody else. It may capture issues with their psychology, their interests, their background, their history, their social networks, etc. We can use those to build a number of different gaming applications around you.

This suite of gaming applications is basically harvesting this 50-dimensional map.

VB: So are there some examples of this idea that do bits and pieces of this in the real world already? Even the simple idea of location-based mobile search seems like it could deliver some of this data to you.

WW: A couple of things I’ve seen in the last month or so are these dating apps, where it’s looking for somebody that matches your interests that also happens to be within a quarter-mile of you. So in that case it’s looking at maybe five dimensions. Not just where you are, but also looking for people around you that have shared interests. That’s a very simple example of something like that; there have been a lot of location-based things that have a very thin game layer on top of them, like Foursquare. Those really started out as utility tools or mapping services, where the people who were working them were technology driven, and they don’t really go deep into gaming psychology. So they will put in an achievement ladder and that’s that. That’s the game, which is where Foursquare is.

We’re looking at how we build much deeper, more involving gaming experiences. But we build them out of the real world rather than the fantasy worlds.

VB: What are some examples of those 50 dimensions you’re talking about?

WW: Oh, we’ve got lists. You can imagine a lot of them. Imagine anything that would describe the things that would be of interest or available to you at any specific time and location. So your location is obvious, the time of day is another one, your interests, your skills, people, how much money is in your pocket, what your current mood is, which is actually a very important one. We wanted to design a gaming application that in some sense can start tracking and predicting your mood and even your schedule. It can understand when you go to work, when you have lunch, what times you are free that day. It can have access to your schedule and know what you have planned for the rest of the day.

These are all things that would be specific to you that will triangulate you on the 50-dimensional space. The map is the rest of that space and is basically showing you a proximity to other things, but any parameter about you — a lot of it really involves deeply personal stuff like your mood, state of mind, your schedule and stuff like that. But over time we want to extract this stuff out so that we know you are into a very specific set of things. We might know that other people are into very similar kinds of specific things, and we can track what they’ve done. We can match those interests and then recommend them to you.

We can kind of go with those 50 dimensions — and 50 is really just a number I pulled out of a hat. It’s just the way I think about building out a profile of a user.

VB: So it almost seems like doing some data mining and then building the game around that?

WW: Well, it’s actually almost the opposite process. We want to build games that allow us to mine that data. I have all these apps where they ask stuff like, can I use your location. I usually say no. That’s actually a generational thing. I have noticed how many people who are like 20’s and 30’s have much less concern about privacy relating to apps. One of the things we have to be really cognizant of is that we want to basically get the user on our side in that, any time they share data with us, they immediately get value back. They get entertainment back. And so we reward them heavily for every bit of data they give to us about themselves. And that’s crucial and we will again have different types of gaming apps, but almost every one of them in some sense wants to contribute to data mining, either mining data about you individually or mining data about the world around you.

So in the example I gave about when I was down in Burbank, the fact that these guys meet in that parking lot the last Friday of every month — maybe that’s posted on a web site somewhere, but it’s not in Google Maps. It is things like that we want to basically make accessible within our 50-dimensional map. It is the data we want to capture so that somebody might be playing a game where they are trying to recommend things for me. My friends are kind of playing me like a Sim. And they can see my current needs. They can see how bored I am or how tired I am and they are competing to give the best recommendation to me. And the ones that give  me the best recommendation earn “karma points.” They get more attention focused on them, basically for making my life more interesting.

But as they are doing that, as they are giving me these suggestions, we are also capturing the data into the map and retaining it for later, so it might be several months later some other guy is standing on the corner and he is into cars and then the system understands somebody once suggested that these guys meet in the parking lot on the last Friday of every month. I am going to reuse that recommendation. And so this is an example of how we start building the data set out of entertainment experiences.

VB: Sounds like you are sort of bringing a Sim to life here.

WW: Kind of. In a way. But we are really kind of making it a real-life endeavor. A lot of it is going to be not just this system and you but it’s also going to be getting your friends involved. Have you ever seen the sort of sub-community that has sprung up lately in the Bay Area called the “quantified self“?

VB: Yes. Isn’t Gordon Bell of Microsoft into that as well?

WW: Yes. These people build these elaborate data sets on their personal life, and they look for patterns or insights. They share them. Most people are doing their own data sets or counting calories or figuring out how much time they spend doing email or whatever the weird thing is they love, basically capturing metrics about themselves and then figuring out how to interpret the data. And that’s exactly what we want to do. People in general are very narcissistic, and so the more we can make this whole thing about you, the more we can get people emotionally attached to it. And so this is kind of back to the idea that we make the game out of you and your life and so, intrinsically, your gaming experiences should be as interesting to you as your dreams, because they are going to be deeply personal.

VB: Yeah.

WW: And so that’s kind of what brought us to start thinking of this as what we are calling personal gaming. How do we make games that really are about you and your life?

Pages: 1 2

HiveMind is a game, and it’s also the name of a new Berkeley, Calif.-based startup Wright is unveiling today in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.

The idea is a new evolution in gaming that Wright calls “personal gaming.” It is a game that can customize itself for the individual player, taking into account aspects of player’s real-life situation as elements of the game.

It’s not an easy concept to understand, particularly because Wright isn’t describing the game in detail yet.

“Rather than craft a game like FarmVille for players to learn and play, we learn about you and your routines and incorporate that into a form of game play,” Wright said.

He noted, for instance, that there may be 50 different dimensions to a person that could be learned through data collection. Some of those dimensions could be location-based, like where you are, where your friends are, and how much money is in your wallet. It may sound like a creepy invasion of your privacy for game to know that about you, but Wright wants to emphasize the entertainment value of sharing and why people will probably share that information gladly.

Wright’s inspiration came last year when he went down to Burbank, Calif., to give a talk and showed up early. He wandered down the street to a 1950s-style diner. There, he found a bunch of car enthusiasts who gather on the last Friday of each month to show off their cars. A car buff himself, Wright had a great time talking to those people. It was random luck, but quite entertaining.

“If I knew about these events, my life would be a lot more interesting,” he said. “How do we expose you to these events, these things? How can we make a system that understands enough about you and gives you situational awareness? It could take into account what time of day it is, where you are, how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map.”

Wright’s idea with HiveMind is to collect data so that the game can discover opportunities for a person to have fun, directing the person to the right place where they could enjoy themselves, based on their interests. If the HiveMind knew enough about Wright, for instance, it could have found that gathering of car experts for him.

“It is about how we make reality more interesting to you,” Wright said.

Harvesting data to entertain you

Although he realizes many people are guarded about privacy, he notes that the younger generation is more comfortable sharing information about themselves. And they will willingly share it if they could be virtually guaranteed a great deal of entertainment in return. If you entice people with enough game-oriented entertainment, they won’t mind sharing that information, he said.

What Wright hopes to do is harvest a bunch of data and then use that to suggest ways to entertain a person. Once HiveMind gathers this kind of data on a lot of people, it could go into a kind of matchmaking service, as happens with sites that collect dating information. HiveMind could mine the data and discover useful things about its players.

“It blurs entertainment, lifestyle, and personal tools,” Wright said. “With that data, the world and the opportunities for entertainment within it become more visible to you.”

“If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life,” Wright said. “How do we get you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it?”

Once again, as he has done so many times in his career, Wright is talking about a kind of game that has never been done before.

“This has to do with where gaming is going,” Wright said. “We had our eras in console gaming and social gaming. A lot of this personal gaming will happen on mobile devices. The question here is how can we learn enough about the player to create games about his or her real life.”

The inspiration for this game also came in part from researchers who are talking about “a quantified self,” where they gather everything about their life and behavior and store it in digital form. Researchers like Gordon Bell of Microsoft, who created a project called MyLifeBits, believe they can gain self knowledge by recording their lives in minute detail.

Examples of this include fitness programs like Nintendo’s Wii Fit, where you can measure your daily exercise progress, as well as more recent fitness measurement devices from Basis (pictured) and Striiv. The basic principle behind these fitness devices is gamification, or making a non-game activity more fun by using game mechanics.

But Wright doesn’t want to limit HiveMind to something like fitness. What if, for instance, an application could tap into something as personal as your dreams? That suggestion is way out there, but it is intriguing.

Nor does Wright want to limit his scope to something like augmented reality (layering digital data on the real world), or Foursquare, which gives people achievements when they check into locations.

Such applications might know a few dimensions about a person, but they just don’t go deep enough into gaming psychology, which could really motivate a person to do something. Here, the games will enable HiveMind to mine data about a person.

Wright said it wasn’t a requirement that you have to be near someone playing the same game as you. He called that the “density problem,” something that augmented reality games run into all the time. Augmented reality companies can create multiplayer games, but there might only be one other player within 20 miles of you. Wright said his game won’t rely on players needing to be near each other to play.

Turning to others for problem solving

One of the elements of the game goes back to The Sims. In that game, the artificial intelligence was built into the objects around the simulated people, rather than the people themselves. The objects would advertise themselves to the Sim, which had to fulfill its needs in the order of most urgency. The Sim turns to the object that fulfills the most urgent need.

In his new game, Wright said, you might turn to your friends to help fulfill your needs. They could send messages to you that try to get you to do something that you need to do. In that sense, your friends could help you accomplish some of the things that you want to do in real life. That is a kind of crowdsourcing, where lots of people contribute ideas to solve a big problem, and it is one of the things that the internet is great for.

The internet essentially operates like a “hive mind” when a problem needs solving. And that is why Wright is calling the new company HiveMind. He thinks that collectively, people can help individuals solve problems.

That idea reminds Wright of a sci-fi story by Bruce Sterling called Maneki Neko, named after Japanese gift cats. The story is about the “gift economy” where people contribute gifts to strangers and in return get back everything that they need. People can earn “karmic points” that can be redeemed, a common feature of social games on Facebook.

Wright sees this vision for a game as the logical extension of his game career. He moved from simulating and solving the problems of cities with SimCity to solving individual or family problems with The Sims. Now he is moving not toward solving the problems of a simulated person, but solving the problems of a real person while entertaining them too.

“When you look at the arc of the games I have done, starting from SimCity, they are each mining a deeper level of creativity,” Wright said. “And they are more focused on the individual over time.” Hence, Wright is now in the age of personal gaming, where the “user becomes the game.”

Wright said the ideas percolated over the past six months while he was mulling things over at his other startup, the Stupid Fun Club. That company is more like an idea generator and a think tank, not an operational company. HiveMind’s three founders include Wright, serial entrepreneur Raj Parekh, and game finance expert Jawad Ansari.

Details on the funding for the company, its schedule for releasing games, and other matters will be released over time. The game could be staged on a mobile devices or Facebook, and other game platforms as well.

It is possible that the HiveMind game will interact with other ideas coming out of the Stupid Fun Club, including an unannounced TV show that is in the works based on a Stupid Fun Club idea, Wright said.

Wright is hoping that his announcement today will trigger interest from like-minded developers who have been thinking about the same thing. He plans to scale up the HiveMind business and make it into a big operation with lots of talent, building apps, a back-end system, and anything else needed to make the HiveMind a reality.

“We want to do this in a very big way,” Wright said.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

The company just signed a partnership with health community Medhelp, which will anchor GravityEight’s health channel. Medhelp has 12 million users and will provide a selection of its 50 tools and applications to GravityEight.

GravityEight’s mission is to measure, manage and enhance eight areas of its users’ lives: health, finance, relationships, career, community, spirituality, learning and leisure. In the health area, it integrates with health and fitness tracking devices like Nike+  Run tracker, the Withings wireless body scale and the Zeo sleep monitor.

Consuming content on a particular channel, such as health, builds up “awareness credits.” If you hit your running target for the week or keep your weight under the desired threshold you get “action credits,” which boost your health score on the wellbeing wheel. There is also a social component where you can share data with those who have a shared goal.

While there are plenty of health dashboards around, GravityEight’s unique selling point is its focus on a user’s entire life and how to quantify it in a single dashboard. Your community contribution, for example, could be measured by participation in volunteering, contributions to charities or loans made through Kiva. Tools in the relationships channel include Facebook and Paperless Post, while the learning channel links to TED talks and homeschooling curriculums.

I asked CEO David Wamsley whether wellbeing can really be measured. “Nobody has quite cracked the code here,” he told me. “Health and personal finance are much more easily measured. Simply measuring gets you closer to where you want to go. We are going to start by doing health really well and starting the discussion on quantifying the other areas.”

There are several aspects to the business model. There will be ads in articles on the various channels. GravityEight will act as a distributor for the fitness gadgets and other measuring devices that it integrates into the platform. According to Wamsley, 15 million people in the U.S. already possess such a device. In the longer term, the company may add additional services like personal coaching.

MedHelp is expected to be the first in a series of partnerships to bolster the various channels on the site. Setting his sights high, Wamsley told me, “We want just 8 of the 16 minutes per day Mark Zuckerberg gets from every Facebook user.”

GravityEight was founded in May 2010 and launched in June 2011. It’s based in Marin County, California, has 6 employees and is privately funded.