Author: Jon Collins / Source: Gigaom
Based in the UK and Moscow, AURA Devices is launching a fitness band that goes to places others currently don’t based on what it calls ‘bio-impedance’ technology. The company’s Kickstarter is being pretty successful, with the company nearly doubling its original goal of $40,000.
I spoke to co-founder Stas Gorbunov about the wrist-based health monitoring device.1. Where did the ideas behind AURA come from?
The technology behind AURA was based on a university scientific project around bio-impedance, following which the founders decided to bring it to the wider market. When we started out, we wanted to use bio-impedance more conveniently than currently. So we thought about fitness trackers — we went to the corporate guys, the big IT companies, insurance companies who were working on smart health, if you are fit can reduce premiums and so on.
We also worked with athletes/fitness enthusiasts – who can track how body compositions changed, and people wanting to lose weight, who need to track how weight changes during the day. So this is our audience.
2. What does AURA bring to the party?
First, the hardware design. Most of the hardware parts you can find on the market, you can build bands but it’s all about having the right design for the device. There are a lot of issues to doing this. The main challenge is to ensure accuracy, as the device is pretty small – it only has two points where it touches skin, whereas a medical-grade device has 8 points.
The most exciting and unique feature is hydration level — it’s very difficult to do this, but we want to bring it to your wrist.
Having said this, our IP is mostly in the software. The main idea is about interpreting the data, making big data comparisons and so on. For example, we can increase accuracy by adding information about activity type and lifestyle.3. How does it fit within the fitness and health ecosystems?
The Aura band is just an instrument to get data about you –…
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