We interviewed our exhibitor Heikki Raisanen from Emfit and asked him a few questions about wearables and beyond. You will also have the opportunity to meet the team at our WT | Wearable Technologies Conference 2016 ASIA that will be taking place in Hong Kong on October 12.
Can you explain a bit more about your involvement in wearables?
We are a sensor manufacturer, but we also manufacture whole products with focus in health tech, all of which are contact free bed sensors with different applications. We focus in seizure detection for care of people with epilepsy, bed occupancy and exit monitoring for fall prevention in elder care, and now also athletes’ recovery monitoring.
We are very happy to have you exhibiting with us both in San Francisco and Hong Kong. Which products are you planning to show?
First we are showing Emfit QS, which we deloped for recovery, fatigue and sleep quality tracking for athletes and people interested in quantified self. Now it has found traction also among occupational health for quantifying employees’ short and long term recovery from work. We are also showing Safebed Cloud, which uses same hardware and code base in our servers, but is customized for enabling safe living of elderly living alone and in any institutional care.
Your company is focusing especially on sleep quality. What are the most important technology developments in this area.
We’d like to say we are focusing on recovery analysis rather than just sleep quality alone. Recovery is why we sleep and if we do not get sufficient recovery each day, it has a negative effect on our health. One of our core competencies is all-night heart rate variability analysis that Emfit QS does automatically every night. What’s really great about this product is that there’s no need to wear any device or use a phone for measurement.
How do you think the wearables market will develop in the next few years?
We think we are just in the beginning of the this new era. Focus will move to collecting more true health data and combining health data, for example combining heart rate variability analysis every night with daily activity tracking, like exercise, work and nutrition. We also believe that we’re going to start collecting data of our moods and personal feelings and how these affect us and how we feel about our health, both in good and bad ways. We now talk about “wearables”, but the word will disappear and will be replaced with something that better describes why we all do this, tracking of all this data.
What is your favorite wearable and why?
I actually don’t use any wearables, because I don’t like to wear any devices, and that’s why I only use Emfit QS and it’s perfect for me. It requires zero effort!
