Halo Wearables, a wearable fitness startup, wants to bring hydration tracking into the mainstream with Halo Edge, the company’s first wearable.
Instead of monitoring heart-rate and step-count, Halo Wearables believes tracking hydration will prove more useful for athletes.
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“Hydration for us is another element which has significant possibilities beyond counting steps or looking at activity. Physiologically, in my opinion, it goes beyond heart rate monitoring,” said chief technology officer, David Miller, to Wareable.
Halo Edge is a simplistic wearable, it shows the user’s hydration level through one of four LED lights: the green light means normal hydration, yellow means decreased hydration, red means a lack of hydration, and blue means too much hydration.
Data is sent from the user’s wrist to Halo Wearables analytics platform to calculate whether the user is too hydrated or lacks hydration. If the user wants to dig for more details, Halo Wearables provides a mobile and desktop app, for athletes that want to know their peak.
In the first few days of using the wearable, Halo Wearables platform will learn the user’s normal hydration level and change algorithms to personalize the device. From there, it will watch for daily changes, like preparing for a marathon or more exercise, and change accordingly to fit the new regime.
For now it’s all in the wrist
For now, Halo Wearables is focused on the wrist, but said in an interview with Wareable that it is looking into concepts for the ear, head, and thigh. This could provide the analytics platform with more accurate data on the user’s health and hydration.
Halo Wearables also sees a potential future licensing its tech to “billion dollar companies” in the wearables market, like Apple or Google. The focus of mainstream wearables has been step-count and heart-rate, but the Halo Edge shows there is more to fitness tracking than just those two features, even for regular customers.
