TWIWT II: Week of October 7, 2024

‌Here is a quick rundown of what happened in wearable technology for the week of October 7, 2024 (list not exhaustive).

Concept image for Neuranics MMG Wristband. Image adapted from Business Wire.

Neuranics announces £2.4 million project to revolutionize human-machine interfacing with gesture-detecting wristband

Neuranics is a spin-off company from the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh that specializes in the development of high-precision magnetic sensors, based on the underlying technology of Tunnel MagnetoResistance (TMR). They are utilizing TMR to build magnetomyography (MMG) sensors. They have now secured an £800,000 grant from Scottish Enterprise towards a £2.4 million project to build wristbands that will use MMG and machine learning to interpret muscle movements through soft bands and provide gesture recognition for extended reality applications.

You can read more about the announcement here.

Side notes (in the style of Bill Simmons’ use of footnotes):

1. This technology reminds me of Meta’s EMG-based neural wristband , which they announced back in 2021. In a much more refined state, it is now part of the Orion AR glasses kit.

2. An even earlier example of similar technology is an EMG-based armband developed by Thalmic Labs in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 2014. Thalmic Labs no longer exists; it later changed its name to North, created smart glasses called Focals, and was acquired by Google. The Myo armband is also no longer available.

Whoop adds Steps count metric

The step count metric was not available on Whoop—well, not until this week. Whoop founder Will Ahmed was initially skeptical of the metric. However, he changed his mind with the emergence of evidence showing that step count is a useful metric for promoting physical activity—regularly reaching over 7,000 (some studies mention 8,000-9,000) steps per day has been correlated with a lower risk of chronic diseases and mortality. Here, Will cleverly announces the update on X/Twitter, using it as an effective mini marketing campaign as Whoop continues to reposition itself as wearable technology that can help everyone improve performance and recovery—not just elite athletes.

Apple could launch their own smart ring

Based on the information provided by CCS Insight, CNBC is reporting that Apple could launch their own smart ring in 2026 in response to Samsung entering the market earlier this year with the Galaxy Ring. Meanwhile, Oura remains the leader in the smart ring space.

Read the full report here.

Other interesting developments and links

1. BCI system can decode speech from the motor cortex, which raises privacy concerns about your private thoughts. New research shows that proper training can help you protect your thoughts from accidental decoding.

2. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank and financial services company, published a 37-page primer on brain-computer interfacing as the next big opportunity in medical technology, estimating a total addressable U.S. market of $400 billion.

3. A study compares the Oura Ring (Gen3), Fitbit (Sense 2), and Apple Watch (Series 8) against polysomnography for sleep tracking accuracy in healthy adults. It seems that Oura won.

Missed from last week

1. A wearable sweat sensor helps firefighters stay hydrated.

2. A study on a wearable in-sensor computing platform based on stretchable organic electrochemical transistors, published in Nature Electronics.

3. A perspective article on mechanical and electrochemical sensors that can be used in wearable technology for real-time health monitoring, published in Nature’s Communications Materials.