LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – We figured health and fitness was going to have a large footprint at CES this year, and so far we haven’t been disappointed. Case in point, the Zensorium Tinke dongle: it measures heart rate, respiratory rate and the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream — all just by pressing your thumb on it.
The idea behind the Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile ($99) is that the quality of your sleep affects your health in a bigger way than we generally recognize, and that measuring the amount of time we sleep and its quality — then quantifying that sleep with a number on a 100-point scale — will give us the information we need to improve our sleep, and ultimately our health.
Despite all our 21st-century technical wizardry, one of the easiest and least expensive ways to get a very basic idea of physical health is through a metric that’s been used for a very long time: body weight.
The Withings WiFi Body Scale ($160) takes this concept to the next level in many ways, including allowing you access to all your data on a gorgeously designed iOS app. It also adds an even more important metric, body fat percentage, and goes a long way to erasing many of the pitfalls using a simple scale can lead to — and it does this all while remaining incredibly easy to use. In fact, it might be the most effective tool I’ve used to keep healthy.
Wahoo’s popular ANT+ Fisica dongle, which allows the iPhone to read signals from fitness gadgets like heart-rate monitors, pedometers and bike sensors, is probably most widely used fitness iPhone accessory since its release a little over a year ago. And today, Wahoo took the first step toward killing it.
Just like their older system, Zeo’s new Sleep Manager Mobile tracks your sleep patterns using a transmitter worn on the forehead while sleeping that relays your sleep state to a receiver. Only Zeo’s new gadget transmits the data directly to the iPhone.