24 Mar 2014
By Belle
Belle

Toothbrushes, body scanners and a new smartwatch to keep track of your life: Quantified Self weekly links

1. Quantified Self toothbrushes: Smartybrush and Kolibree

Kolibree

I didn't know dentition was a word before I came across these toothbrushes, which apparently track that exact thing. The Smartybrush aims to monitor your dentition and help you to avoid dental cleaning appointments by cleaning them yourself.

The Kolibree (pictured) is more focused on encouraging regular brushing. It uses Bluetooth to send real-time feedback to an app on your phone, showing which teeth need more attention and how long you've been brushing for. It also has some gamification features to encourage kids to brush.

2. More than just numbers

Mat Honan wrote this great piece for Wired about Apple's Healthbook and what the Quantified Self movement really needs now:

We tend to focus on individual metrics in isolation–like heart rate or step counts–because they are easy to measure. It means we sometimes track fitness metrics and mistake it for health simply because it’s something we can measure. Fitness is a component of health, sure, but so is diet. So is your genetic makeup, disease, and your environment. It’s all important, and you need to know how it interacts to get truly meaningful information about your health. But there isn’t a great holistic way to first track all this stuff and then extract meaning from it. Which makes it very tempting to look at how many steps you took yesterday and conclude, “I’m healthy.”

3. Moto 360

Moto 360

With the announcement of Android Wear came a preview of the Moto 360 by Motorola. It's a round smart watch that attempts to look like a traditional watch while extending the functionality with notifications and alerts.

4. Quantified Self at work

The Guardian takes a look at companies tracking the health and fitness of their employees:

Staff at a London analytics company are obligated to take part in an experiment that sees them using a variety of apps to monitor their entire lives – and according to its founder, if they "didn’t want to do it, [they] were out."

5. Scanadu

If tracking physiological signs like blood pressure is important to you, you might want to try this little scanner. It's not available for purchase yet but you can sign up to be notified via email when it's ready.

Scanadu

The company also has a urine testing kit called Scanaflo coming soon.

More:

Image credits: Uncrate, PC Mag, Scanadu

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