If there’s a counter argument for that University of Pennsylvania study suggesting there’s little difference between the accuracy of smartphone fitness apps and fitness wearables to track steps, Steve LeBoeuf would be the one to make it. He’s the president of Valencell, a company that develops and licenses its PerformTech technology that powers several wearable devices.
Earlier this month it secured patent approval for innovative technologies to enable some wearables to more accurately measure vital signs. Although it has developed technology for wristbands, more recently it has focused on using earphones to track this data.
In response to emailed questions, LeBoeuf offered his perspective on the report’s conclusions which both underscored his view but also contradicted it.
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“Waist-worn pedometers were the most accurate (Fitbit Zip), but wrist-worn pedometers were the least accurate (Fitbit Flex and Fuelband),” LeBoeuf noted. “This is what we’ve been communicating for years now — the wrist is the least accurate platform for mobile monitoring.” But he also noted that smartphones can’t measure heart rate continuously.
One of the patents Valencell secured zeroes in on the noise problem — when sensors get jostled by the motion of a runner or activities like typing, it might show that as a spike in heart rate.
LeBoeuf said its new patents will help make monitoring calorie burn much more accurate, because energy expenditure can be assessed when with footsteps aren’t being generated. “The biggest weakness with wrist-worn pedometers is that they cannot assess calories burned unless someone is taking a footstep. Moreover, some folks have attempted to add heart rate to wrist-worn devices in order to make the calorie-burn estimates more accurate. However, since the heart rate monitoring is so inaccurate, so is the calorie burn estimate.”
Among the patent approvals Valencell received earlier this month is a way of using light as a tool to filter out noise and to help generate physiological parameters for users for heart rate, blood flow and blood pressure. Another covers a photoplethysmography sensor — seen as an alternative to ECG to monitor heart rate.
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