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iOximeter monitors your heart-rate, is powered by your phone's headphone socket
Connecting health-monitoring hardware to smartphones is a no-brainer. The phone does the heavy processing, offers up power and screen, and thus makes the hardware cheaper and more importantly , smaller. However, you still need to power the thing, which can be tough when you're trying to gauge vitals overnight or longer. Insert Coin competitor iOximeter, a pulse oximeter, reckons it's solved that issue by taking what it needs, power-wise, from your headphone socket. Using a special pulse sensor (that it already owns the intellectual property rights for), iOximeter drops the power requirements down to under 8mA, which means it frees up the typical smartphone battery port (micro-USB or Lightning; it's iOS- and Android-compatible) to continue charging. "Because we can add more features through the smartphone app, unlike some relationships, it's going to get even better over time." The sensor we toyed with at Expand was accurate to within 2 BPM at resting heart rates (it gets even better when you're riled), while it can also count the level of blood oxidation -- thus the name. That isn't where the capabilities stop however, and future development focuses on both respiration rate (intake per minute) and heart-rate deviation, which sounds like a scary metric that would deserve some monitoring. "Because we can add more features through the smartphone app, unlike some relationships it's going to get even better over time", said iOximeter's Yale Zhang, with a sigh. Aside from health business applications, where a cheap long-term monitor could make remote care a whole lot more feasible, the team has already seen interest from, oddly, yoga and meditation groups. These people are apparently looking to log and monitor exactly how relaxed (precisely!) they're getting during their mantras. No price has been set yet, although the team is promising it'd be an accessible one. We'll update when we get a price tag. Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.
Insert Coin semifinalist: iOximeter is a simple, cross-platform wellness tool
Pulse oximeters that connect to your smartphone aren't exactly new. In fact, a super-hackable Bluetooth model called smARtPULSE wound up as a finalist in our Insert Coin competition early this year out in San Francisco. What sets the iOximeter apart is its cross-platform compatibility and extremely low power requirements. In fact, it's able to draw all the juice it needs from the headphone jack on your phone. The appropriate data is also transferred over a standard issue audio cable and presented in an app on your iOS or Android device. That leaves you free to charge your phone while watching your the oxygen saturation levels in you blood climb. Data is not only presented in real time, but recorded for later analysis. You can see all of the Insert Coin semifinalists here.
