I don’t really like the current set of wearable offerings. I’ve used the Nike Fuel Band, Jawbone Up and the Basis. Initially, the novelty is cool, but in the end they all fall short as none of them are really accurate enough or fully featured enough to be anything more than a gimmick.

In the future, I think wearables should make the assumption that you already have a smartphone in your pocket, and so they can communicate with the smartphone directly for the majority of the day. This way, design of the wearable can focus on capturing information that a smartphone can’t capture as well (like movement or heart rate). The wearable can then send this data to the phone to do the number crunching and get increased accuracy by combining similar data that is captured by the phone or other wearables. If you combine multiple sources capturing similar things, you can vastly increase the accuracy of the data. It’s how mobile location data become so much more precise – gps, cell tower and wifi data all combined together.

The one health tracking tool I actually really like is the Withings scale. I like having a historical view of my weight and how it wirelessly syncs to a server somewhere so I never have to think about inputting the data, but can access it and use it in conjunction with other apps such as Lose It as I find useful. I think it does a good job of focusing on being a sensor and a display for weight without trying to do too much.

Once we improve the quality of the data from wearables and increase the number of types of sensors (breathing, heart rate, sleep, movement, weight, food intake etc) then we’ll be able to draw really awesome insight by combining information from lots of different sources to get a better picture of overall health and track changes over time.

It could be interesting if my doctor had a dashboard with all the inputs from my wearables and can see long term trends as well as use this information to help diagnose current or future conditions based on what’s happened in between visits.