Airo health monitor promises to track all you eat, show you proteins, carbs and fats

We are on the verge of the wearable device revolution - smart watches, smart glasses, it’s all about to finally start hitting retail shelves in 2014, giving us a first taste of the future. One gadget that aims to take a prominent position in that future is the Airo wearable health monitor, a sci-fi-looking wristband with a nigh-magical function to count down every calorie that enters your body. And not just quantify the calories, but break them down by protein, fat and carb contents.

The technology that Airo aims to use to do this is called spectroscopy and basically consists in that the wristband shines LEDs located on the inside of the wristband at your veins and measures the reflections from your blood to understand what you’ve been eating. This is allegedly possible as all food that enters your body leaves its fingerprint in your blood.

In addition to this novel feature, Airo will also monitor heart-rate variance to illustrate stress levels, and also keep track of how you exercise and sleep, a function that is common on other fitness trackers.

Sounds pretty remarkable, doesn’t it? Too good to be true, if you ask us. The Airo team does not have a working prototype just yet, nor does it have an actual app to show to the press. Moreover, it does not have the funds yet.

So who are the dreamers creating this and why should you trust them? Behind Airo is a small team of four: CEO Abhilash Jayakumar is one of three founders (looking to expand), all engineers graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and there’s a fourth team member. The projected has started on $85 000 grants and the just started pre-orders are a way to get more funds, but without involving websites like Kickstarter.

We contacted experts and educators in the sphere of spectroscopy and they were pretty skeptical about whether this would work. The fact that there is no detailed technical information on Airo’s website does not help convince us either.

“I think it is theoretically possible, but distinguishing between fats, proteins and carbs would be very difficult especially when they’re in a mixture with other things as well,” Dr Jenny Koenig of Cambridge University told us.

Clearly, there is a mountain of challenges ahead of Airo, as many as it might sound like a pipedream at the moment, but sometimes a pipedream is the exact type of challenge technologists like to overcome.

If you trust this ambitious team of engineering graduates, you can jump in and pre-order Airo for $149 at the source link right at the bottom of the article, and thus help them tackle those challenges. The release date for Airo is set for fall 2014.





source: Airo