Jawbone’s New Wearable, the Up3, Is Ambitious in All the Right Places




We tend to talk about wearables with a sense of inevitability. They’re gonna happen, and they’re gonna be big. We’re just … not exactly sure what that looks like yet. Health stuff, sure. Payments, maybe. Notifications? Ack. From our vantage today, it’s still tough to envision what a truly ubiquitous wearable might look like.


The Jawbone Up3 doesn’t answer that question definitively. But it offers some reassurance that any feelings of inevitability are not misguided. In terms of both its guts and the skin they’re wrapped in, the new band’s ambitious design pushes the category forward in important ways.


The Up3 is the latest in Jawbone’s line of activity-tracking bracelets. It is much smaller than its predecessor, the Up24, and much more advanced. It’s the company’s first product to incorporate biometric sensors, leveraging a proprietary bioimpedance technology with an eye on tracking all sorts of new things about the body, including heart rate and skin temperature. Next year, Jawbone plans to use over-the-air updates to give Up3 the ability to gather data on respiration and hydration. The eventual goal is to track more nebulous signals like stress and fatigue.


All of this data will feed into Jawbone’s app, which will continue to focus not just on displaying data but helping people make sense of it in useful ways. (Jawbone’s also announcing a $50 device called the Up Move. Capable of basic activity and sleep tracking, it’s meant as more accessible entry point to the software platform.)


jawbone-inline3

Jawbone



The Up3, which will go on sale later this month for $180, packs all this promise into a surprisingly small package, one that feels more like an accessory than anything you’d think to refer to as a device. Hosain Rahman, Jawbone’s CEO, likes to refer to it as the the first “second phase” wearable—a true multi-sensor tracker that can be worn all day, and night, for several days at a time. If it lives up to that promise, it could be the best picture yet of what we can really expect from the hazy wearable future.


Sensors, and Making Sense of Them


While advanced biometric sensors have been creeping steadily into fitness trackers, the Up3 relies on fundamentally different technology than its competitors. Things like the Apple Watch and the Fitbit Charge HR use optical heart rate monitoring, which flashes light on the skin to track blood flowing through the capillaries below. This approach is has a few well-known shortcomings. Darker skin pigments and ambient light can confound the sensors, for example. Sometimes, capillaries at the wrist don’t accurately reflect what’s going on at the heart.


Jawbone’s using a different technology, developed in-house with the help of Body Media, a sensor tech startup it acquired last year. The approach is based on something called bioimpedance. Instead of relying on light sensors, it sends a small electrical current through the body and measures tissue’s resistance to it.


At launch, Jawbone will use the new sensors (in addition to the accelerometer from the previous model) to track resting heart rate, which the company says it can monitor with accuracy comparable to clinical-grade devices. But the sensors could unlock access to other signals, which Jawbone hopes to incorporate with over-the-air updates starting next year. These include moment-to-moment heart rate, respiration, hydration and galvanic skin response. Eventually, Jawbone thinks it will be able to biometrically monitor things like stress and fatigue.


It remains to be seen how accurate these readings will be (Jawbone, it’s worth noting, has gotten ahead of itself with ambitious hardware before). But there’s no denying it’s a novel approach, technically speaking. As Travis Bogard, Jawbone’s vice president of product, says, “No one has this technology, and more importantly, no one’s been able to get it into something small enough you can wear on the wrist 24/7.”


jbinline1

Jawbone



Still, collecting data isn’t especially useful on its own. Jawbone knows this, and has led the pack in building software that helps people use that data to make healthy life decisions. The current version of the Up smartphone app doesn’t just tell you about past activity but tries to help shape what you do next. It’ll encourage you to walk a little on a slow day, for example, or remind you to go to bed early on a night when you’re trying to get eight hours. For regular people, this is tremendously important stuff. It will be essential for making wearables truly attractive to a mainstream audience.


Jawbone plans to continue pushing ahead here. The new version of the app accompanying the Up3 will perform more detailed sleep tracking, doing its best to delineate light, deep, and REM sleep making suggestions based the readings. The added sensors also will make the app smarter about identifying workouts, helping it determine when you’re playing tennis, say, or doing yoga. A new feature called Smart Coach is intended to be a single source for all this personalized, actionable data.


But this is just the obvious, proven stuff you can do with the new sensors. Jawbone’s convinced there are many other interesting things these signals and streams will open up. Rahman reels off a few ideas: What if your thermostat knew your body temperature and could adjust itself accordingly? Even more interesting: What if your wearable could sense that you were starting to feel stressed out, and suggest just the right song to calm you down?


Jawbone won’t try to sniff out these novel use cases by itself. Instead, it will continue to let outside developers work with its platform, encouraging third parties to find meaningful ways to look at the data. The advanced sensors aren’t just about giving people a higher resolution of quantified self. The real aim is to use them to power all sorts of new experiences. “That’s absolutely where we’re going,” Rahman says. “That’s what the platform enables.”


“We think of this as a feature phone to a smartphone transition, in terms of what the platform-level capabilities will enable other applications to do,” he continues. Jawbone’s making the platform. It’s happy to let someone else figure out what the killer app for galvanic skin response will be.


A Band Apart


The first thing you notice about the Up3 is how small it is. The part that sits on top of your wrist is the same size as the Up24, but instead of going all the way around, it’s just 1.5 inches long, with its face doubling as an invisible capacitive display for a few basic interactions. The rest is a thin, one-size-fits-all strap that fastens with a elegant side-loading clasp.


Designed by Jawbone’s longtime collaborators at Fuseproject, the new device is one third the volume of the Up24. That makes a huge difference. Seeing it is a little like encountering a smartphone with a bigger display for the first time: At first it feels kind of weird, but then somehow a minute later your old phone looks pathetically, impossibly small. In this case it’s the opposite: A few minutes with the Up3 makes its handsome predecessor look like gigantic rubber manacle.


jawbone-inline

Jawbone



The other remarkable thing about the industrial design becomes clear when you see a few different Up3 bands next to each other. They look nothing like. While the device will launch with a single staid configuration in black rubber, it was designed to accommodate all sorts of colors, textures, and materials. Jawbone showed me prototypes with straps made of canvas and leather. Some models were understated; others were sporty. One white-and-gold number looked like something you’d wear with a ballroom gown.


Fuseproject founder Yves Béhar likes to refer to the Up3′s design as a hardware platform. In coming months, Jawbone will release new versions using different colors and materials. In the future, they might even bring in other people to collaborate on designs. The chameleon-like versatility brings to mind the Apple Watch and its diverse impeccably-designed bands—though Béhar is quick to note he and his team were working on the Up3 long before Apple debuted its timepiece.


Designing for this sort of versatility involved all sorts of challenges. It was one thing to get the bioimpedance sensors working on a rubber strap that could snugly fit wrists of all sizes; figuring out how to combine the electronics with materials like canvas and leather introduced new hurdles. “You’re just talking massive R&D to get something like this done,” Béhar says.


Still, talking to Béhar, it’s clear that this is always where the Up was headed. The designer says he’s wanted to incorporate leather and fabric into these sorts of products for years; he’s just been waiting for the technology to catch up.


You often hear people in the wearable biz say that the real dream is designing something people would wear even it didn’t work. With the Up3, at the very least, the idea isn’t entirely laughable. And if the band’s next-generation sensing technology does deliver on its promise? Then you’ve got something that could be very compelling to a whole lot of people.



The Next Big Thing You Missed: Surfboard Collects Oceanic Data While You Ride Waves


Board Formula’s Smart Phin.

Board Formula’s Smart Phin. Board Forumla



Benjamin Thompson is a surfer. You would know it even if I hadn’t told you, and even if you hadn’t seen the photo of Thompson where he’s barefoot on the sidewalk, holding a surfboard.


Board Formula founder and engineer, Benjamin Thompson.

Board Formula founder and engineer, Benjamin Thompson. Board Formula



You’d know it because he says stuff like this: “Most technology is pretty rad, like it does this cool thing to make my life easier, but at the end of the day, we’re just growing more and more disconnected from nature and our birthright as engaged humans and animals in our environment.”

So, yes, Thompson is a surfer, but what’s equally important to know is that he’s also an engineer. And now, Thompson is using this rare combination of skills to build a new product that could radically expand our understanding of the world’s oceans.


It’s called Smart Phin, and it’s the product of a partnership between Thompson’s consulting startup, Board Formula, and a small environmental non-profit called the Lost Bird Project. Smart Phin is a surfboard fin equipped with a special sensor that not only tracks a surfer’s location, but also measures the temperature, salinity, and acidity of the water to give researchers insight on the impact of climate change over time.


Thompson has been developing the fin for about two years, and it’s still very much in the testing phase, but this fall, he got a major vote of confidence from the industry when he was selected as one of 18 teams competing for the $2 million Wendy Schimdt Ocean Health XPRIZE. Now, Thompson must prove that the device can withstand the harshest—or dare we say gnarliest—waves the world’s oceans have to offer and still deliver accurate results. If it works, Board Formula could help turn surfers around the globe into a fleet of citizen scientists, crowdsourcing information on what is, perhaps, Earth’s most opaque natural resource.


surf-data-inline1

Board Forumla



In a world that grows more “Big Data”-obsessed by the day, the amount of information we have on the world’s oceans remains curiously small. In fact, according to the National Ocean Service, less than 5 percent of the world’s oceans have been explored. There’s good reason for that. “You put anything in the ocean, and it gets pounded to death, critters grow on them, the temperature changes, and ions corode the metal,” says Paul Bunje, senior director of oceans at the XPRIZE Foundation. “Stick something in the ocean, and it wants to get destroyed very quickly.”


It’s particularly tough to collect information near the shore, where waves are crashing. An innovation like Smart Phin could change that. “Surfers are going in the water everyday. They’re in the most critical, hostile zone, and they’re doing it willingly, and they’re doing it for free,” Thompson says. “We’re chopping of a whole section of the cost of research, and that could be a real paradigm shift in the way data is collected.”


Thompson didn’t set out with this mission when he first founded Board Formula back in 2010. Initially, he was simply trying to convince the surfing industry that their boards could be greatly enhanced by a little engineering. But no one was buying it. What Thompson needed, he realized, was proof. So he started designing a sensor that would monitor how surfboards change shape in water. “The intention was to collect as much information as possible on surfboards, so I’d be able to say: ‘See? You should pay me to engineer things,’” Thompson says.


Instead, this novel sensor caught the attention of Andy Stern, executive director of the Lost Bird Project. Stern is all too familiar with the challenges of tracking the changing oceans, particularly near the shore, where waves are always crashing. “I thought: ‘We could be sticking these fins on boards all over the world,’” Stern says.


Since then, Lost Bird Project has been the sole backer of the Smart Phin, and will have distribution rights once the product is complete. But it could take some time to get to a commercial product. In addition to the rigorous testing being done through the XPRIZE Foundation, the sensor is also being vetted by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD.


Once it’s complete, Thompson says the plan is to sell the fins in stores, but open source the data so that other developers can build their own consumer apps on top of it. Thompson, for one, is pretty “stoked” about the possibilities. “Ultimately, it comes down to making surfers stakeholders, making them part of the process,” he explains. “We’re saying: ‘Here’s the information. You’re part of collecting it, and you have the capacity to make a difference in people’s relationship to the ocean.’”



How Google Will Use Firebase to Supercharge Its Cloud Computing


Illustration: Ross Patton/WIRED

Ross Patton/WIRED



Instacart offers a mobile app that lets people shop for groceries over the internet. And yet, it still manages to duplicate the family trip to the local supermarket.


Different people using different devices, you see, can share the same “virtual shopping cart.” From her Apple iPad, Mom can slip milk and butter into the cart, even as Dad is adding coffee and doughnuts from his Android phone.


In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a huge deal. But it’s a useful app—Instacart delivers all those groceries to your door—and it’s indicative of where the internet is headed: toward a world where we can easily share information among multiple devices in real-time. The trouble is that building apps like this is rather difficult. But Instacart has taken a shortcut to this new breed of mobile computing. The San Francisco startup built its app using a rather unusual cloud computing service called Firebase. “We use it pretty much anywhere we need real-time information,” says Instacart co-founder Brandon Leonardo.


In a reflection of the larger move toward apps that trade data in real-time, a wide range of businesses now run software atop the Firebase service—including everything from Nest, the internet of things startup now owned by Google, to Jawbone, the wearable computing startup. According to the company, over 100,000 developers actively use the service, and it’s likely that many more will soon join them.


Last month, Google acquired Firebase, and on Tuesday, at an event in San Francisco, the tech giant will formally announce the service as part of its larger portfolio of tools for software developers, showing off a few ways Firebase can integrate with its own cloud services. According to Google product manager Ophir Kra-Oz, Google and Firebase share the same “vision” for the future of the net. Real-time mobile apps, he says, will “become the new standard.”


Competing with Amazon and Microsoft, Google already offers two major cloud computing services where developers and businesses can build and host their mobile apps and other online software: Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine. But Firebase is different. It provides a relatively easy way of speeding communication between two or more computing devices.


Instead of sending data back and forth between multiple devices, it creates a central data repository that all devices share. If several people are using the same Instacart shopping cart, for instance, they don’t trade data directly. Firebase sends all their shopping cart updates to that central repository hosted on its cloud service. When one device updates this repository, the changes are then automatically shared with all other devices.


What this means is that multiple devices can update each other while sending a minimal amount of data over the wire. This also means that apps can continue to operate reasonably well when they don’t have an internet connection. What’s more, because that central data repository is hosted on Firebase’s computer servers, companies don’t need to set up data servers of their own. “As an engineering team,” says Instacart’s Leonardo, “we can focus on other things—the stuff we’re good at.”


Firebase can help power all sorts of apps, from chat clients to services that let multiple people edit documents at the same time. Google plans to dovetail the service with other Google cloud services that help developers expand the scope of their applications, according to Kra-Oz and Firebase founders Andrew Lee and James Tamplin, who will continue to oversee the service from inside Google.


“Joining Google means that we can now take a developer from the very outset—the very concept—of their app, right the way through to a very complex application,” says Tamplin. “We can have this platform under one roof that can take you from start to finish.”


On Tuesday, Lee will demonstrate a new Firebase tool called “Triggers,” which lets developers automatically send an API (application programming interface) call to other cloud services anytime something happens in one of those central data repositories on Firebase. This is a first step toward integration with Google’s larger universe of cloud computing services, including a new service called Google Container Engine. Announced on Tuesday, Container Engine help run apps using Linux containers, a means of making online software more efficient.


In acquiring Firebase, Google also hopes to raise the profile of its cloud computing services—at least in a small way. As Leonardo says, Firebase is well known among the Silicon Valley developer community, and it can help bring some added cache to Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine, which are much younger than the cloud services offered by rival Amazon and not nearly as widely used. “An acquisition is about technology, customers, and talent,” says Google’s Kra-Oz. “In this case, we managed to get all three.”


With Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all going after this massive market in a big way, cloud services have become something of a commodity. But Firebase gives Google a service that’s unique—at least for the time being. As Leonardo puts it: “There’s nothing else that is what Firebase is.”



Jawbone’s New Wearable, the Up3, Is Ambitious in All the Right Places




We tend to talk about wearables with a sense of inevitability. They’re gonna happen, and they’re gonna be big. We’re just … not exactly sure what that looks like yet. Health stuff, sure. Payments, maybe. Notifications? Ack. From our vantage today, it’s still tough to envision what a truly ubiquitous wearable might look like.


The Jawbone Up3 doesn’t answer that question definitively. But it offers some reassurance that any feelings of inevitability are not misguided. In terms of both its guts and the skin they’re wrapped in, the new band’s ambitious design pushes the category forward in important ways.


The Up3 is the latest in Jawbone’s line of activity-tracking bracelets. It is much smaller than its predecessor, the Up24, and much more advanced. It’s the company’s first product to incorporate biometric sensors, leveraging a proprietary bioimpedance technology with an eye on tracking all sorts of things about the body, including heart rate and skin temperature. Next year, Jawbone plans to use over-the-air updates to give Up3 the ability to gather data on respiration and hydration. The eventual goal is to track more nebulous signals like stress and fatigue.


All of this data will feed into Jawbone’s app, which will continue to focus not just on displaying data but helping people make sense of it in useful ways. (Jawbone’s also announcing a $50 device called the Up Move. Capable of basic activity and sleep tracking, it’s meant as more accessible entry point to the software platform.)


jawbone-inline3

Jawbone



The Up3, which will go on sale later this month for $180, packs all this promise into a surprisingly small package, one that feels more like an accessory than anything you’d think to refer to as a device. Hosain Rahman, Jawbone’s CEO, likes to refer to it as the the first “second phase” wearable—a true multi-sensor tracker that can be worn all day, and night, for several days at a time. If it lives up to that promise, it could be the best picture yet of what we can really expect from the hazy wearable future.


Sensors, and Making Sense of Them


While advanced biometric sensors have been creeping steadily into fitness trackers, the Up3 relies on fundamentally different technology than its competitors. Things like the Apple Watch and the Fitbit Charge HR use optical heart rate monitoring, which flashes light on the skin to track blood flowing through the capillaries below. This approach is has a few well-known shortcomings. Darker skin pigments and ambient light can confound the sensors, for example. Sometimes, capillaries at the wrist don’t accurately reflect what’s going on at the heart.


Jawbone’s using a different technology, developed in-house with the help of Body Media, a sensor tech startup it acquired last year. The approach is based on something called bioimpedance. Instead of relying on light sensors, it sends a small electrical current through the body and measures tissue’s resistance to it.


At launch, Jawbone will use the sensors to track resting heart rate, which the company says it can monitor with accuracy comparable to clinical-grade devices. But the sensors could unlock access to other signals, which Jawbone hopes to incorporate with over-the-air updates starting next year. These include moment-to-moment heart rate, respiration, hydration and galvanic skin response. Eventually, Jawbone thinks it will be able to biometrically monitor things like stress and fatigue.


It remains to be seen how accurate these readings will be (Jawbone, it’s worth noting, has gotten ahead of itself with ambitious hardware before). But there’s no denying it’s a novel approach, technically speaking. As Travis Bogard, Jawbone’s vice president of product, says, “No one has this technology, and more importantly, no one’s been able to get it into something small enough you can wear on the wrist 24/7.”


jbinline1

Jawbone



Still, collecting data isn’t especially useful on its own. Jawbone knows this, and has led the pack in building software that helps people use that data to make healthy life decisions. The current version of the Up smartphone app doesn’t just tell you about past activity but tries to help shape what you do next. It’ll encourage you to walk a little on a slow day, for example, or remind you to go to bed early on a night when you’re trying to get eight hours. For regular people, this is tremendously important stuff. It will be essential for making wearables truly attractive to a mainstream audience.


Jawbone plans to continue pushing ahead here. The new version of the app accompanying the Up3 will perform more detailed sleep tracking, doing its best to delineate light, deep, and REM sleep making suggestions based the readings. The added sensors also will make the app smarter about identifying workouts, helping it determine when you’re playing tennis, say, or doing yoga. A new feature called Smart Coach is intended to be a single source for all this personalized, actionable data.


But this is just the obvious, proven stuff you can do with the new sensors. Jawbone’s convinced there are many other interesting things these signals and streams will open up. Rahman reels off a few ideas: What if your thermostat knew your body temperature and could adjust itself accordingly? Even more interesting: What if your wearable could sense that you were starting to feel stressed out, and suggest just the right song to calm you down?


Jawbone won’t try to sniff out these novel use cases by itself. Instead, it will continue to let outside developers work with its platform, encouraging third parties to find meaningful ways to look at the data. The advanced sensors aren’t just about giving people a higher resolution of quantified self. The real aim is to use them to power all sorts of new experiences. “That’s absolutely where we’re going,” Rahman says. “That’s what the platform enables.”


“We think of this as a feature phone to a smartphone transition, in terms of what the platform-level capabilities will enable other applications to do,” he continues. Jawbone’s making the platform. It’s happy to let someone else figure out what the killer app for galvanic skin response will be.


A Band Apart


The first thing you notice about the Up3 is how small it is. The part that sits on top of your wrist is the same size as the Up24, but instead of going all the way around, it’s just 1.5 inches long, with its face doubling as an invisible capacitive display for a few basic interactions. The rest is a thin, one-size-fits-all strap that fastens with a elegant side-loading clasp.


Designed by Jawbone’s longtime collaborators at Fuseproject, the new device is one third the volume of the Up24. That makes a huge difference. Seeing it is a little like encountering a smartphone with a bigger display for the first time: At first it feels kind of weird, but then somehow a minute later your old phone looks pathetically, impossibly small. In this case it’s the opposite: A few minutes with the Up3 makes its handsome predecessor look like gigantic rubber manacle.


jawbone-inline

Jawbone



The other remarkable thing about the industrial design becomes clear when you see a few different Up3 bands next to each other. They look nothing like. While the device will launch with a single staid configuration in black rubber, it was designed to accommodate all sorts of colors, textures, and materials. Jawbone showed me prototypes with straps made of canvas and leather. Some models were understated; others were sporty. One white-and-gold number looked like something you’d wear with a ballroom gown.


Fuseproject founder Yves Béhar likes to refer to the Up3′s design as a hardware platform. In coming months, Jawbone will release new versions using different colors and materials. In the future, they might even bring in other people to collaborate on designs. The chameleon-like versatility brings to mind the Apple Watch and its diverse impeccably-designed bands—though Béhar is quick to note he and his team were working on the Up3 long before Apple debuted its timepiece.


Designing for this sort of versatility involved all sorts of challenges. It was one thing to get the bioimpedance sensors working on a rubber strap that could snugly fit wrists of all sizes; figuring out how to combine the electronics with materials like canvas and leather introduced new hurdles. “You’re just talking massive R&D to get something like this done,” Béhar says.


Still, talking to Béhar, it’s clear that this is always where the Up was headed. The designer says he’s wanted to incorporate leather and fabric into these sorts of products for years; he’s just been waiting for the technology to catch up.


You often hear people in the wearable biz say that the real dream is designing something people would wear even it didn’t work. With the Up3, at the very least, the idea isn’t entirely laughable. And if the band’s next-generation sensing technology does deliver on its promise? Then you’ve got something that could be very compelling to a whole lot of people.