Microsoft is working to combine biometric data collected by its
new wristband with information from your calendar and contacts to make
smarter observations.
Microsoft’s
first foray into wearable activity tracking will go beyond collecting
and analyzing exercise and sleep patterns to, say, telling you how
stressed out you get before an important meeting and offering breathing
exercises to calm you down.
Released in October, the Microsoft Band
costs $200 and houses a variety of sensors including a microphone, a
GPS location sensor, motion sensors, an optical sensor that measures
heart rate, a sensor that tracks skin conductance, which can reveal
levels of stress, and even a UV sensor to calculate sun exposure, all
encased in a black, rubbery bracelet with a rectangular touch screen.
The band communicates with your smartphone via the Microsoft Health app, which itself communicates with Microsoft’s cloud-computing service to analyze the data you collect.
Many
fitness bands and smart watches that can track your activities are
already on the market, and devices like the Band and the
soon-to-be-released Apple Watch—which
also uses an optical sensor to determine heart rate—seem poised to
deliver new ways to collect and use your biometric data. During a recent
interview at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters, Matt
Barlow, general manager of marketing for new devices, said the company
is investigating the kinds of insights it can share with users by
matching up biometric data with other sources of information like their
calendar or contacts to show things like which events or people may
stress them out.
In
the coming months, the Microsoft Health app is poised to gain the
ability to compare calendar or contact information with your physical
state as measured by the band—your heart rate or skin conductance level,
for instance—so the app could nudge you with detailed observations
about how those things might relate. For instance, the app might send
you an alert like, “I noticed you have a meeting with Susan tomorrow,
and last time you met with her your heart rate went up 20 beats per
minute and stayed elevated for an hour. How about trying this
deep-breathing exercise that you can use with the Band?”
Initially,
these kinds of scenarios are expected to become possible through an
integration with Microsoft Office services, though over time it may
branch out to include other services as well.
Emil Jovanov,
an associate professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who
directs a lab for real-time physiological monitoring and codirects a lab
aimed at tracking mobile health and wellness, says that the types of
sensors in emerging wearables are generally accurate enough to provide
these kinds of insights.
He
cautions, however, that trade-offs have to be made between accuracy,
power consumption, weight, and size in order for these devices to be
convenient to use. And he notes that optical sensors, such as the one
used in the Microsoft Band, need good contact with the skin to work
reliably, which is harder to achieve if you’ve got hairy arms or wear
your wristband too loosely.
Accuracy
is still a challenge for companies making wearable devices for tracking
biometric signals and activities—measurements tend to vary between
devices, and even accurate readings may not always provide a valid
measure of sleep patterns or stress. One way the Microsoft team is
working on the accuracy of the data that its sensors record is by
tracking people as they work out in a gym. It correlates data captured
by its wristband there with data recorded by, for example, a machine
that measures oxygen consumption.