Track your health like a future astronaut
SAN FRANCISCO — The team that developed the wearable technology for tracking the vital signs of future NASA astronauts was obsessed with power consumption.
It had to be.
The mission to Mars being planned by the U.S. space agency for the early 2030s will take about 14 months round-trip, requiring any electronic devices used onboard the (still-to-be-built) spacecraft to run a long time between charges.
So Yong Jin Lee, the researcher whose company was chosen by NASA in 2007 to design a predictive health-and-fitness tracking system for Mars-bound astronauts, had to be strict with his developers.
"We had them track each line of code on a current meter," says Lee, who's now designed and built sensors for four U.S. departments: the Army, Navy, Homeland Security and NASA.
After seven years of research into how to build wearable devices for space travelers, the result is a smartwatch so advanced it can detect a bad mood or health problem before the person wearing it can.
It can also operate for six months without a charge, even with its notifications function turned on, Lee told me this week in San Francisco.
"The power consumption was the most significant breakthrough" his team made, says Lee, now chief technology officer of Salutron.
The Fremont, Calif.-based maker of fitness and health-tracking gear acquired Lee's company, Linea Research, in 2012.
"Ten years from now all these devices will be much smaller, more efficient and better-predictive of stress and fatigue," says Lee, who has four engineering degrees from Stanford University, including a Ph.D.
Starting this month, consumers will be able to buy the current version of Lee's smartwatch technology that will someday capture and analyze the health data of NASA astronauts.
Apart from tracking temperature, heart rate and other common health metrics, the new LifeTrak Brite R450 device has a capability that could not have even been imagined in the 20th century.
In 2001, neuroscientists at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (working along with a government research hospital in Bethesda, Md.) discovered that the human eye has a receptor that uses blue light to control the body's production of melatonin.
A key brain chemical, melatonin regulates the body's circadian rhythm, or natural clock, and so has a big impact on human sleep cycles.
The new watch has a sensor that knows whether its wearer is getting enough blue light.
If its wearer is an astronaut with a wireless link, the folks back at Mission Control would then know to recommend some sleep — or a dose from a blue-light-emitting panel — BEFORE any grouchiness appears.
That's a good thing for anyone cooped up in a very small space with several colleagues for more than a year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Or for anyone in a northern latitude who suffers mild depression from a lack of sunlight, an affliction also known as seasonal affective disorder.
Consumers who want that level of physiological tracking can pre-order the watch now at lifetrakusa.com for $129, or wait until it hits retail stores later this month.
An older model, the c410, can go up to a year without a charge and is available for prices ranging from $49 to $99 at retailers and online, including at Amazon.com.
As with traditional watches, both LifeTrak devices will require a replacement battery once the original wears out.
While some later generation of these devices will someday enjoy an epic float through the solar system, the current models face a brutal landscape for consumer smartwatches here on Earth.
Pebble, whose crowdfunded watch helped pioneer the category, cut the price of its watch to $99 on Wednesday.
Samsung earlier this year rolled out watches that also track sleep activity as well as other vital signs.
Jawbone, a start-up, has wearable devices that do the same.
Apple, meanwhile, is preparing to ship its new watch for the consumer market early next year.
For now, though, consumers who want to own a smartwatch with a battery good enough for NASA can only get it from Dr. Lee and his team of power-obsessed developers.
John Shinal has covered tech and financial markets for more than 15 years at Bloomberg, BusinessWeek,The San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal Digital Network and others. Follow him on Twitter: @johnshinal.