Wearables – Page 6 – Product Management Confabulation

December 27, 2021

Movano targets an H2 2022 launch for its fitness ring

My first in-person experience with a fitness ring was back at CES 2017. Four years later, one wonders if they might be having a moment at next week’s show — in-person or no. The Motiv ring demonstrated the potential for moving fitness band functionality onto a ring, but ultimately fell short. More recently, Oura has found more success demonstrating what these products can actually do.

I anticipate seeing more startups explore the burgeoning form factor in 2022, and CES is positioned to be the tip of that spear. Movano, an East Bay-based medical device company, announced the upcoming arrival of its own Ring device. Aimed at women, the product is designed to monitor heart rate, sleep, steps, calories, blood oxygen and breathing — standard fitness tracking stuff.

The product looks to differentiate itself as a more serious healthcare product, offering up actionable insights to wearers — also something that’s increasingly becoming a target as wearable makers look beyond simple step counts. Oura, for instance, has participated in various studies in an effort to get to something deeper with all of the data it tracks.

Also, like, Oura, the company has made its app the centerpiece of that information — understandable, for a device that returns to the days of screenless fitness trackers. Says John Mastrototaro, the company’s CEO, in a release:

Movano was founded on the core belief that good health is a fundamental human right, but good health requires more than a few static metrics from an annual physical. We’ve set out on a mission to put your health in your hands with affordable and non-intimidating devices. Our app notes your body’s signals and transforms them into insight.

As the release notes, Movano is still in that rough fitness device limbo of seeking FDA clearance, specifically for things like blood oxygen and heart rate. It’s a tough hurdle for relatively young companies, but an important one in the quest toward being taken more seriously as a healthcare product.

Such things can ultimately have an impact on release dates — or, depending on how the company plays it, the launch feature set. At present, the product is set to arrive at some point in the second half of next year, as a beta release. It’s the first — but almost certainly not the last — fitness ring you can expect to see getting some play next week at CES.

December 14, 2021

Oppo’s first self-developed chip is all about imaging performance

Chinese smartphone giant Oppo revealed its first in-house chipset at its annual innovation event hosted in Shenzhen on Tuesday. The MariSilicon X chip announced — named after the Mariana Trench — is a neural processing unit that aims to boost photo and video performance through machine learning.

The move adds Oppo to a list of smartphone makers that are designing their own chips, such as Apple. The MariSilicon project, headed by Qualcomm veteran Jiang Bo, started only in 2019.

The silicon is being manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC)’s 6-nanometer process technology and will be featured in Oppo’s upcoming flagship handset in the first quarter of 2022. The ongoing global chip shortage will not affect the production of MariSilicon X, Jiang told the press at the event.

Oppo also unveiled the third generation of its self-developed smart glasses, dubbing it an “assisted reality” device instead of an augmented reality one.

The description is apt. The headpiece, which weighs just 30g, is reminiscent of Google Glass. It uses the Snapdragon 4100 chip, which is normally found in smartwatches, and it’s indeed limited to projecting 2D information such as navigation and translation onto its 1.3mm-thick glasses. It works as an extension of one’s smartphone, or like a smartwatch with a screen in front of one’s eyes, rather than an AR device that’s aware of one’s environment. It’s slated to ship next spring.

Oppo’s new ‘assisted reality glasses

The third piece of product unveiled is Oppo’s first folding phone, which came a year after its concept scrolling phone. Details of the folding phone will be announced tomorrow, at which point we will update the story accordingly.

What we know so far is the new phone is spearheaded by Pete Lau, Oneplus’s co-founder who was appointed Oppo’s chief product officer after OnePlus became Oppo’s subbrand this year.

Both owned by the BKK Electronics empire, OnePlus and Oppo shared a supply chain prior to the merger but were operating independently. The merger has seen the two phone makers combining operational and R&D forces, including their operating systems, while the brands remain separate.

OnePlus’s other co-founder, Carl Pei, has been drumming up buzz for his new earbud venture Nothing, which has won over investors and a horde of early followers.

China’s smartphone giant Oppo ratchets up AR push

December 3, 2021

Oura Ring 3 review

I admit I was thinking about the Oura Ring incorrectly. I was thinking of the device as an alternative to my Apple Watch. I suppose this is true, in the vaguest sense — likely for most people, it’s one or the other. After all, two activity trackers is overkill for most. It’s also cost-prohibitive. At $299, we’re well within smartwatch territory on the pricing front.

There’s also the fact that, starting with the Ring 3, Oura is adding a $6/month subscription fee that kicks in after a six-month grace period. The new service arrives with additional features, but also sticks behind a paywall metrics that were previously free to users. The Oura Ring 3 is, in a word, an investment. But it isn’t a smartwatch.

If anything, it’s a successor to the fitness band — a category we don’t think about much these days, but one that utterly dominated the wearable category before Apple sunk its teeth into the space. Companies like Fitbit and Xiaomi still sell a ton of the things on an annual basis, but they’ve largely fallen out of fashion in favor of their more fully featured brethren. The more I’ve begun to think about the Oura Ring as a fitness band (or, perhaps more appropriately, health band), the more it has begun to make sense.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

It is, in a sense, a passive device — not one that buzzes and beeps, constantly demanding attention throughout the day. The Oura Ring is a device to be worn and largely ignored, save for the occasional predetermined nudge for things like movement reminders. And if we’re being honest, that’s always going to be the case here. Sure, many fitness bands have blurred the line with displays, but the ring form factor has some very real limitations with regard to real estate.

Rather, the Ring is designed to stay out of the way, collecting actionable sleep, health and fitness data that you can peruse later on a connected mobile app. And really, that’s long been the selling point here. For the most part, a ring is better at staying out of your way than a fitness band. That was the appeal of Motiv’s initial play — and while that product seemingly moved away from the fitness category, it’s a banner than Oura has been more than happy to pick up and run with.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Before we venture any further, a confession: I’m not a ring guy. I don’t particularly like rings and don’t wear them (cue: “Don’t Fence Me In”). This is one of the big reasons I’m not going to be a regular Oura user. I’ve also, honestly, become fairly attached to my smartwatch. That said, I’ve been wearing the Ring 3 for the prescribed two weeks. That was Oura’s recommendation/soft demand for reviewing the product.

It was a strange request, as far as these things go. When reviewing hardware, you generally like to spend as much time with the product as possible. Easier said than done, sometimes. But here, the company insists that a fortnight is required for setting a kind of baseline measurement. It’s not that readings are going to be bad for the first two weeks, so much as things will be better when you’ve been wearing the device for a bit and Oura has a clearer idea of your habits, sleep and biometrics.

And it’s understandable, given that we’re all different, and customization is a key to any sort of health device. My guess is that sort of buy-in won’t be difficult to engender among those willing to plunk down $299 for a ring. It’s also a relatively simple lift given that it’s a minimally invasive product. Again, as someone who isn’t a ring person, it took some getting used to, but as a bit of a restless sleeper myself, it’s easier to wear to bed than a big, bulky smartwatch. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the built-in irony of a sleep-tracking device that’s hard to wear to bed. The Oura Ring is not that.

It’s comfortable. Because it’s a ring. Again, I’m not a ring guy, but the simple fact of it occupying less real estate makes it less invasive. Design-wise, the product is virtually identical to its predecessor. It’s a single-color metal band, round, but for a flatish edge that denotes the top of the product.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

If you don’t know your ring size, the company will send a sizing kit à la Warby Parker, featuring a number of plastic dummy rings. You’re encouraged to wear one around for 24 hours, as the human finger has a way of swelling and contracting during the day. I chose my size and color (a matte black) and waited. Ultimately, I found the final product to be a bit looser than its plastic counterpart, but the ring stayed on fine. And, indeed, I found that the exact fit tended to evolve over the day.

On the face of it, the device looks like a standard ring — and that’s really the appeal. You will, however, sometimes see a green glow emanating from the inner circle, as the ring’s sensors grab a heart rate reading. Daytime heart rate monitoring is among a handful of new features available at launch, along with period production (something I admit that I did not have an opportunity to test) and improved temperature sensing. Based solely on those new features, the 3 represents an incremental update over the 2.

The list of upcoming features arriving this year and next is a significantly longer one, including additional content like meditation and breathing sessions, workout heart rate monitoring, more accurate sleep staging and SpO2 blood oxygen sensing. In the case of that last one, in particular, it’s not entirely surprising it was delayed — and Oura’s certainly not alone in turning on a key health sensing feature after launch. In this case, it’s not about FDA approval (not yet, at least), but rather implementation.

This stuff is tricky to get right, and that likely goes double when you’re not Samsung or Apple. It is, however, a long list of promised features that will likely leave many potential consumers wondering why the company didn’t wait to launch a more fully realized product. I do ultimately wonder if it’s a piece of a deeper strategy to offer a base of hardware with the promise that features will continue to improve and roll out over the course of its life.

After all, there’s no question that Oura has some long-term ambitions with this stuff. Look no further than the myriad studies in which the company has participated. A cursory glance at its blog shows everything from depression to the impact of phone usage on sleep to adapting to undersea environments. Not everything is going to prove out, and certainly most or many would lead to brand new features, but at the very least, there’s some interesting insight here into precisely how much we’ll ultimately be able to monitor or predict with sensors. Among other things, those studies do appear to have proven out the accuracy of measuring things like heart rate on a finger versus the wrist.

Ultimately, I prefer a wrist-worn tracker like the Apple Watch for its workout tracking. I was able to pair the two and use them to paint an overall picture of my activity. I recognize not everyone has the means — or desire — to do this, however. Where the Oura Ring ultimately succeeds versus more traditional trackers is its emphasis on actionable insights — that’s precisely why the company is so insistent people let it determine a baseline before judging its efficacy.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Things like recovery and readiness tend to be overlooked by these sorts of devices. Oura describes the latter thusly:

Readiness is your main Oura score and is designed for you and only you, helping you discover what works for your body and lifestyle. Readiness is a holistic picture of your health — taking into account your recent activity, sleep patterns, and direct body signals (like resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and body temperature) that can signify if your body is under strain.

Effectively, it takes all of the metrics it has been collecting and determines whether you’re doing a good enough job recovering between them. Recovery Time was a constant red flag for me. Which, fair enough. I could and probably should be doing a better job letting my body recover between workouts. It’s certainly something to improve on, as the red “Pay attention” notifications plainly indicate.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Another place that pops up is sleep. Clicking over to the Home tab, the app notes, “Your heart rate decreased late last night, so you might not by fully recovered. To help your body recharge, how about taking a moment to unwind today?” It seems obvious on the face of it that, say, meditating at night (versus the morning when I usually do) or practicing breathing exercises before bed, would be better for my (admittedly restless) sleep than, say, doom scrolling with my buds on Twitter.

But in amongst the daily grind, it’s easy to lose sight of this fact. I’ve always said that one of the underrated and under discussed benefits of a wearable is that it’s kind of the tech equivalent of tying a string around your finger. It’s an injection of mindfulness and a reminder of why you made that investment in the first place. We buy these things because we want to better ourselves. And in a world where technology too often does the opposite, some positive technological reinforcement is a net positive.

November 17, 2021

Respira wants to monitor your lung health with a wearable

Over the years we’ve seen wearables measuring every aspect of your body, but lung capacity is more esoteric than most. Sylvee is a brand new wearable from Respira Labs which continuously measures lung function — perfect for COPD and asthma patients, and other people who may have temporarily reduced lung function. A certain pandemic that affects lung function springs to mind, in particular.

Sylvee is a product that’s worn at the lower part of the rib cage, and it promises to easily and continuously assess lung function without having to blow into anything. The wearable patch has embedded speakers and microphones that measure changes in acoustic resonance. The company claims that this is a good proxy for changes in lung air volume — which is the basis of pulmonary function testing.

The tech is fantastically clever. Sylvee generates noise through its speakers, and then uses the microphones to measure the sounds that are generated. The theory is that if there are air cavities, this changes the quality of the sound, much like if you were to tap a drum head on a drum set, before filling the drum with cotton, wool or liquid and doing the same. Obviously, these are lungs — I’m not a doctor, but I have to assume that there are typically air cavities in there. The wearable uses the data it collects to measure lung volume, capacity, rate of flow and any trapped air.

“Well-established science shows that air trapping can be measured with more than 90% accuracy using low-frequency sound. There is a clear difference in the acoustic resonance spectra of COPD patients versus healthy controls,” explained Dr. Maria Artunduaga, Respira Lab’s founder and CEO. “With more than 100 million Americans affected by COPD, COVID-19 and asthma, and with an aging population, it can be lifesaving to remotely and accurately monitor lung function and discover a problem early enough to avoid serious consequences. Our goal is to flag abnormalities early, enable earlier treatment at home and empower patients to manage their own health.”

Sylvee is worn on the ribcage. It produces sound — and captures the resonance of the lungs — to determine lung health. Illustration: Respira Labs

The product — Sylvee — is named after Artunduaga’s grandmother, who suffered from COPD and died after symptoms quickly worsened without detection.

“The device facilitates early diagnosis and management of acute deterioration, which is what respiratory patients must avoid. We provide vital information to doctors and patients so they can make the medical treatment changes earlier and prevent hospitalizations, Dr. Artunduaga said. “This is what happened with my grandmother. She suffered from COPD and had a sudden exacerbation of her symptoms and tragically died. I left my medical career and devoted myself to devise the Sylvee because of this terrible and common outcome.”

Respira Labs has set a goal of achieving 90% accuracy in measuring air trapping by pursuing a large trial of more than 500 patients located both in the U.S. and internationally. They also intend to publish in top journals by late 2022. The device is currently in prototype, with FDA clearance expected within the next 18 months.

November 9, 2021

Withings ScanWatch is a great alternative to other smartwatches

When Apple launched the Apple Watch, they made a big hoopla out of teaching its consumers how excited it was about having a “digital crown” and “complications”. To the watch lovers among us, that was a head-scratcher — of course a watch has all of those things.

At the time, Apple was falling victim to its heritage as a computing company. In short — it wasn’t creating a smartwatch — it was creating a tiny iPhone you carry around on your wrist, while desperately trying to convince everybody that “yes, this is a wristwatch, we promise!”

Withings’ Health Mate app is exceptional, especially if you use more than one of the Withings health products. It integrates with Google Fit and Apple Health Kit so you can port the data into your preferred ecosystem. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

I’ve seen the parallel in the car world as well: A lot of the traditional car manufacturers scratched their heads and thought, “How can we cram a truckload of batteries and an electric drive train into one of our cars,” whereas some car manufacturers — Tesla in particular — essentially took the challenge differently. Tesla’s approach was, “What if we could take an iPhone, which just gets better with time as more software updates become available — and build a car around it.” The result, for Tesla, is a car that looks and feels spectacularly different than most of the other cars. Whether or not you prefer the interior and ownership experience of a Tesla or the newest generation of Mercedes electrical car boils down to a lot of things, but in my mind, it’s about a general philosophy and approach to design and functionality.

All of which brings us to the ScanWatch. Withings has always taken a different approach than Apple. With its relatively minimalist watches that actually look and feel like timepieces, it came at the same problem Apple was trying to solve, but the way a watchmaker would do it. How do you build a great, functional watch that looks and feels like a watch, but adds a dollop of smart features? Its Steel HR showed what was to come, and the Withings ScanWatch is a natural and more ambitious step up the ladder from there.

The upshot of the different design philosophy is that you can’t use the Withings ScanWatch as a remote control to take photos with your phone. You can’t talk to it or use it to send texts. You can’t use it to read emails or play music or record voice memos. And if those things are important to you, well, the Withings ScanWatch simply isn’t for you — you’re not looking for a smart wristwatch, you’re looking for a microscopic supercomputer.

The overall build quality and attention to detail of the ScanWatch is extraordinary. This feels more like a premium watch than a miniature computer. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

Having spent a little while with Withing’s top-of-the-line smart wristwatch, I found myself being delighted time and time again, both for all the things it is, but — most importantly — for all the things it is not. I stopped wearing an Apple watch because I disliked the design (it’s a soulless black square — much like a smartphone) and I hated the fact that it kept buzzing and notifying me of messages and tweets and emails. Yes, you can turn those things off, but if you turn off all the smartphone-extension features of the Apple Watch, you eventually end up with very little that makes the watch worth carrying around, especially when you have to charge it every day.

The Withings ScanWatch comes in two sizes, with a 38 mm and 42 mm watch face. Image Credits: Withings

Withings’ ScanWatch is the exact opposite. For one, it looks like a simple, minimalist wristwatch. If the little PMOLED display is off, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a high-end, understated timepiece from one of the many high-end watch manufacturers. The display isn’t a fancy retina display, but the trade-off is that you get up to a month of battery life. The watch feels like a wristwatch, too — heavier than you would think, but in a way that feels reassuring to me. You know that it is there, and if you’re used to wearing high-quality timepieces, that’s not a bad thing.

The ScanWatch also brings a ton of extremely high-end tech to a wristwatch, focusing primarily on health and wellness features — they are an extension of its fitness tracker roots, rather than extending the functionality of your phone.

Withings’ ScanWatch brings a ton of medical-grade trackers to your wrist. The EKG functionality is the crown jewel of the watch/app combo. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

The watch has been available in Europe for a while, and the reason for the delay for its U.S. launch further illustrates how different this device is from its competitors. To launch, it needed clearance from the FDA. Its built-in EKG is high-quality enough, the company claims, to be able to detect atrial fibrillation (afib), one of the most common cardiac arrhythmias — and a leading cause of stroke, heart failure and other heart issues.

To offer that data to you as a consumer, the company claims you need a prescription, and for the first EKG measurement to be analyzed by a medical professional — it isn’t entirely clear how other smartwatch manufacturers with similar EKG functionality get around this, or whether Withings is doing something fundamentally different.

Activating the EKG approval process is free, and you will not be charged whether you are approved or not for continued EKG use. In the meantime, the company is working to make the EKG functionality fully available to users without a prescription or additional costs, presumably by mirroring what Apple, Samsung and the others are doing to get their FDA ducks in a row.

If that all sounds a little over the top, well, you wouldn’t be the first to make that observation. The company went on the defensive before the watch was even released, and ended up publishing a FAQ especially addressing the EKG functionality.

In my mind, it serves to highlight the company’s ambitions to be a health-first device. It fits in very well with the rest of the company’s devices — it sells smart sleep trackers, blood pressure cuffs, smart thermometers and body-fat-measuring scales, for example — and the excellent Withings Health Mate app that powers all of Withings’ devices is vying for your attention as the central hub as your physical health.

Withings’ ScanWatch comes in two sizes. This is the 38 mm version, which feels about right-sized on my “do you even lift, bro?”-sized wrists. Image Credits: Haje Kamps for TechCrunch

The sum of all of this is a truly exceptional (time)piece of technology. The watch crams heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen monitoring, the EKG functionality, step, workout and activity trackers, connected GPS, an altimeter, sleep trackers, smart wake-up alarms and much more, all into a sexy, easy-to-forget device that lives on your wrist.

As a tech reviewer, I don’t have the medical expertise to determine whether all of these features are as good as the company claims they are. From conversations I’ve had with medical professionals, the general consensus seems to be that it isn’t as good as the multi-thousand-dollar industrial medical equipment that lives in your doctor’s office. Frankly, that would be unreasonable in a $300 consumer-grade item you carry around on your arm.

If you are a health and fitness-forward person who cares about style, it’s hard to go wrong with the Withings ScanWatch. It’s an incredible leap forward in wrist-carriable technology and a breath of fresh, well-oxygenated blood into a category that was starting to get a little hypoxic.

For what it’s worth, while I was glad to see the back of my Apple Watch when I put it on eBay a few years ago, I will buy a ScanWatch with my own money once this review unit goes back to Withings; high praise from someone who approaches a lot of gadgets with a backpack full of skepticism these days.

November 7, 2021

Facebook’s ‘meta-existential’ pivot for survival

Jacob Mullins Contributor

Jacob Mullins is a managing director at Shasta Ventures, where he has invested in VR/AR since 2016.

Is China building the metaverse?

Catherine D. Henry Contributor

Catherine D. Henry is SVP Growth at Media.Monks, where she advises leading global brands on how to enter the metaverse.

There is a heated debate on the state of the race between the United States and China to dominate in AI. But perhaps the more strategic question is whether China is building the metaverse.

Built upon infrastructural technologies like AI, the metaverse refers to the vast array of digital experiences and ecosystems, from e-commerce and entertainment to social media and work, where we spend more and more of our lives. It’s soon going to be hard to conceive of a world in which much of our social and economic lives are not defined by the rules of the metaverse. To the builder goes the opportunity to establish rules to their own benefit.

In truth, both the U.S. and China are trying to build and lay claim to the metaverse, with other actors such as Europe trying to do so as well, but they simply don’t control enough of the core technologies that make the metaverse possible.

These core technologies include AI, 5G, end-user devices and the sector-straddling super apps that bring everything together — and related technologies such as smartwatches and eyewear. Competence and dominance across these four criteria is what may give China an insurmountable head start over the U.S. in the race to build the future of the virtualized human experience.

China’s AI advantage

The Chinese leadership understands that AI is revolutionizing virtually all aspects of social life, including consumption. AI is a top priority for government and business, and the Chinese government has called for China to achieve major new breakthroughs by 2025 and become the global leader in AI by 2030.

If the metaverse does become the successor to the internet, who builds it, and how, will be extremely important to the future of the economy and society as a whole.

The strategy was initially outlined in the Chinese government’s New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan in 2017. It has since spurred both new policies and billions of dollars of R&D investments from ministries, provincial governments and private companies.

As a result of China’s AI initiatives, the American advantage in the sector has been steadily eroding: In 2017 the U.S. had an 11x lead over China, but by 2019, that lead had come down to 7x. By 2020, the U.S. was left with a narrow lead of 6x. Even this lead has been uncertain, and the ex-chief software officer of the Pentagon went so far as to say that China already had an insurmountable lead in AI and machine learning.

Moreover, some question the American lead when it comes to the availability of training data. In the privacy versus public good debate, the U.S. tends to lean toward privacy, whereas China has long exercised government intervention in maintaining a civil society as a public good.

Finally, China has access to vast data sets to train AI, which presents a significant strategic advantage, especially considering the country’s population of 1.4 billion.

China builds the devices

The capacity to build and ultimately become the preeminent force in the metaverse starts with China’s long-standing and unrivaled dominance of consumer device manufacturing. From smartphones and notebooks to AR and VR headsets, Chinese manufacturers are building the largest portion and widest varieties of the devices that consumers need to access digital platforms and social experiences. The most advanced design and production competencies are likely to already reside in cities like Shenzhen.

November 1, 2021

Beats Fit Pro review: Ahead of the pack

The thing that makes earbuds supremely difficult to review is that no two sets of ears are exactly the same. Heck, no two ears are exactly the same, period. As someone prone to pain using the wrong set for an extended period, I can appreciate the importance of finding the right pair.

When the Beats Fit Pro first leaked, I had my misgivings. Design-wise, they more or less look like the Studio Buds the Apple subsidiary released over the summer, with one major difference: wings. Wings, wingtips, eartips, fins, whatever you call them, I hate them. I respond viscerally to the sight of them, in fact — weird little pointed things you’re meant to jam into your ears.

Now, I admit that much of this is a holdover from testing workout headphones some years back. In those days, wings were, to a fault, hard plastic things that were every bit as pointed as they looked. And while I can appreciate from a stability standpoint how such a feature works during, say, a long run, I largely try to avoid putting pointy things in or near sensitive parts of my body — except when absolutely necessary.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

In spite of my initial hesitancy, I’m happy to report that my concerns were overblown. The Fit Pros are comfortable. Like surprisingly so. The buds themselves are fairly small, with the eartips adding wingspan to the design. They’re not unlike the Powerbeats Pro in that respect, but they’re able to accomplish their task with significantly less plastic. The key to the tips’ success is their size and shape and, equally important, the fact that the silicone they’re made from is malleable, meaning they keep things still without digging into the surrounding cartilage.

I’m going to stop short of calling them the most comfortable earbuds I’ve tested. Honestly, that distinction probably belongs to their older sibling, the Powerbeats Pro. While that design is big and somewhat unwieldly, the over-the-ear displaces the weight and pressure of the buds. And while the Fit Pros only weigh 11.2 grams, that can still wear on you after extended periods.

They also do an admirable job keeping things in place. I took up running again recently, and have been trying all sorts of earbuds (with limited success). When we think about keeping headphones in place while working out, we (I think understandably) tend to focus on physical movement. What we tend to ignore is how that combines with sweat, making it both difficult to keep the buds in place and hard to fumble to adjust them.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The Fit Pro excelled there better than any other buds of recent vintage on this front. If you’re primarily looking for a pair of gym buds, these are hard to beat (so to speak). The wingtip meets the bud to form a physical button. It’s meant to be pressed at the edge furthest from the tip. Pressing in the middle will apply more pressure to your ear. A single press will play/pause/answer a call, double skips a track forward, three goes back and a long press toggles between ANC and transparency modes.

These sorts of physical buttons are necessary for workout headphones. Touch gets a bit tricky when you sweat. The biggest downside on this front is that the relatively small size does result in some accidental button presses if you need to adjust them while working out. But even so, they’re well ahead of most earbuds for this purpose. It’s also a nice change from Studio Buds, which I found extremely difficult to keep in place while going for a run.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

It’s worth noting that the wingtip’s attachment to the button means it’s not removable or user-replaceable. That’s a bit of a bummer. It would be great to be able to take the tips off when a workout is over, though likely that would compromise their structural integrity — and it’s just another thing to possibly lose. But if the wingtip gets damaged, you’ll need to send the whole thing back (if under warranty). Apple/Beats isn’t selling that bit separately.

The sound is good here — pretty similar to what you get on other Beats. That is to say, it’s bass-heavy. If you’re looking for a pair of buds for, say, enjoying the subtle nuances of jazz, I’d recommend something from Sony. These are more “let’s toss on a pumped-up playlist and go for a run” headphones — and there’s certainly a place for that. Active noise canceling is excellent, as well. It did a good job blocking out ambient street noise and bad gym music, especially when I swapped in a large pair of silicone tips.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Being Apple-owned, it’s probably unsurprising that the buds work best with iOS devices. That’s due in large part to the inclusion of the H1 chip. In addition to fast paring and automatic device switching, you’ll get Find My functionality and Spatial Audio. That last bit, which is also available on various AirPods, uses headtracking to redirect the sound of audio. That means a more speaker-like experience for music listening and assigning the location of voices based on screen placement in FaceTime. I’ll be honest, it feels like a novelty for now. Android users, meanwhile, should download the Beats app for the full experience.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

One of the unheralded upshots of moving from loops to wingtips is getting a significantly smaller charging case. The Powerbeats Pro’s case is a monster. The Fit Pro’s isn’t small by any stretch (it’s still significantly larger than the AirPods), but it’s actually small enough to carry around in a pocket. And thanks to some hardware advances, you actually get more combined battery on the Fit, at 27 hours versus 24. The buds themselves are rated at six to seven hours, depending on use. The case takes about 90 minutes for a full charge, doing so via USB-C — a distinct advantage for those of us who aren’t big Lightning fans. Points lost, however, for the exclusion of wireless chargin.

Interestingly, the Fit Pros don’t actually replace any other member of the Beats family. Power Beats Pro, Studio Buds and all of the tethered units are sticking around. There’s a bit of redundancy here, but Beats has always played it a bit faster and loser than its parent company on that front.

At $199, they’re right between the Beats Studio and the Powerbeats Pro. But for most people in most cases (particularly those who work out frequently), they’re the best bet of the bunch. They go up for preorder today and start shipping November 5.

October 29, 2021

Zeit secures $2M in seed funding for its stroke-detecting wearable

Zeit Medical, which makes an early warning system for strokes during sleep, has raised $2M in a seed round just after leaving Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort. The company’s work suggests the brain-monitoring headband could save lives by alerting people to possible strokes hours before they might otherwise be noticed, and the new funding will help propel them towards commercial availability.

The company’s device is a soft headband with a lightweight electroencephalogram (EEG) in it. It works with a smartphone app to analyze brain activity and, using a machine learning model trained by human experts, watch for signs of an impending stroke.

I wrote up Zeit’s system in detail in August, and little has changed since then, though co-founder and CEO (and now Ferolyn fellow) Orestis Vardoulis noted that a usage study found that people wore the headband on 90 percent of nights, including people using CPAP machines, and there were few complaints about fit or comfort. Consistent usage is important if the goal of mitigating the effect of strokes is to be achieved, and an uncomfortable or bulky headband would certainly affect that negatively.

“Besides pushing hard on getting the product finalized and ready to be tested in our upcoming studies, we have also been experimenting with different applications of our AI in the inpatient setting. Many intensive care unit patients require close ischemia monitoring,” Vardoulis said. Various conditions can potentially be warned of by the model Zeit has created that would otherwise need an expert or a dedicated system to diagnose. “We have approached several large national academic centers that monitor their subarachnoid hemorrhage patients with EEG to understand if this would be an acceptable application for our technology.”

Vardoulis said the stroke survivor community has been very interested in the device, and even on our coverage people in the comments noted how useful the device might be to them. For anyone wondering how they can get hold of a device, it may be a while — Zeit is charging towards FDA clearance and has received “Breakthrough designation,” a sort of fast track, but it may still be a year or two before it’s widely available.

Zeit’s early warning wearable for sleep strokes could save hours and lives

That’s still a remarkably short lead time for a medical device, and investors clearly thought this was an opportunity for both impact and ROI.

The $2M round was co-led by SeedtoB and Digilife, with participation from Y Combinator, Gaingels, Northsouth Ventures, Tamar Capital, Axial, Citta Capital, as well as angels Greg Badros, Theodore Rekatsinas, and a few others in the medical world.

The money will be used, as you might expect, to continue and expand operations, building the team and funding the studies prerequisite to FDA consideration and approval. With luck Zeit’s device could be standard issue to anyone at risk of a stroke as early as 2023.

October 28, 2021

Tiger, Coatue double down on Hinge Health with new $400M infusion

Hinge Health, the San Francisco-based company that offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, like back and joint pain, closed on $400 million in Series E funding to give the company a $6.2 billion valuation.

Tiger Global and Coatue Management, which co-led the company’s $300 million Series D round back in January, are back again to lead this one. They are joined by Alkeon Capital and Whale Rock, which put in a $200 million secondary investment to acquire some ownership in Hinge. Tiger, Coatue and Alkeon were also recently an investment team in Abacus.ai, which announced a $50 million round this week.

Sources: Hinge Health has raised $300M Series D at a $3B valuation

The new investment, which brings Hinge Health’s total funds raised to date at over $1 billion, will be funneled into technology and product development to improve access, outcomes and patient experiences, Daniel Perez, co-founder and CEO of Hinge Health, said in a written statement. The company also touts that it is “now one of the most valuable companies in digital health.”

Hinge Health’s technology aims to reduce MSK pain, surgeries and opioid use through the use of advanced wearable sensors and computer vision technology that is monitored by a clinical care team of physical therapists, physicians and board-certified health coaches.

So far this year, the company, which is approaching 1,000 employees, more than doubled its customer base to now serve over 575 enterprise customers. It also rounded out its leadership team with new hires Lalith Vadlamannati, who joined as chief technology officer after spending 13 years at Amazon, and Vincent Lim, chief people officer, who has previous experience scaling teams at Google, Medium and JUUL Labs.