Autom™ Updates

A recent article in Fast Company magazine on the myriad things that smartphones are starting to do that can help us not only track our health, but to improve it as well.  I was excited to see the article starting off with Ramesh Raskar’s work at the MIT Media Lab (Camera Culture Group), which was where I developed the prototype version of what has become Autom™ (old research page  and Cynthia Breazeal’s Personal Robots Group).  Ramesh has developed a smartphone app and an add-on device for the phone’s camera that lets the phone be used for conducting eye exams with around $30 of equipment.  This has been spun off into a company called EyeNetra (http://eyenetra.com/) to help put this technology into the hands of as many people as possible.

But this is just the beginning of what is talked about in the article, which is in turn only a small piece of the coming revolution in consumer healthcare technology.  At Intuitive Automata, we’re excited about devices such as the Fitbit that tracks your steps throughout the day; the armbands from BodyMedia that tell you how many calories you’ve burned, how many steps you’ve taken, and more; and the Withings scale that will report your weight, body fat percentage, and BMI every time you step on it.  The reason we like these devices is that they automatically transmit this information to your account on the Internet where today they’re accessible to you via a web site or smartphone app and tomorrow Autom™ will know these numbers and be able to give you even better feedback and advice based on exactly what you’re doing each day.

We’re seeing a lot of changes in recent years in the technology that is available to help each of us keep track of what we’re doing.  And this is great — but mostly for those of us (like me) who love to track all of these numbers.  Which reminds me that it’s time to sync my BodyMedia armband in the background while I type.  What’s coming next is even more exciting though and that’s the ability to do something more intelligent with those numbers.  After all, what’s important is not really the 8,278 steps I walked today (an inactive day with lots of meetings for me), but what I should be doing to reach my goal of living a healthy life.

What we’re working on at Intuitive Automata is that next level of making sense of all of this data and presenting it to each of us in a way that is not only easy to understand, but is actionable.  What I really want is to know what I should work on tomorrow and over the coming days to make sure that I can continue to lead an active, healthy lifestyle for as long as possible.  So what do all of these smartphone apps and consumer healthcare devices really mean?  Hopefully that each of us can be as healthy as possible for as long as possible.