PREMIUM - The Future Of Wearable Sensors

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization.

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Ben Greenfield (0:24)

Buh-bye.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and I know that the world of wearables, these devices that self-quantify everything from your heart rate to your heart rate variability to your respiration to your perspiration and more, they can be a little bit confusing. I know that an entire section of the consumer electronics show was devoted just to the huge number of emerging wearables that are out there on the market. And I thought it would be interesting today to delve into one of the latest wearables made by a company called Echo Labs, just to kind of learn a little bit more about how these things are made, their accuracy, and also some of the unique elements that this Echo Labs wearable in particular measures. So my guest today is Pierre-Jean, who's the co-founder of Echo Labs, and he's a guy who definitely knows wearables. So, Pierre, how's it going?

So my first question for you is, are you measuring anything right now at this moment while we're talking? Are you a self-quantification guy?

Pierre-Jean (1:46)

I'm actually not right now at this minute. I've obviously tried pretty much everything that's on the market, have been left pretty unsatisfied, and in a way, that's why we started this company.

And as we speak, we're actually having 100 units in production of our latest prototype, which is basically gonna be our first consumer-grade product.

Ben Greenfield (2:13)

Okay, got it. Now, how did you actually get into this? Is this something that you studied in school? Were you like an engineer or something like that?

Pierre-Jean (2:21)

No, I mean, it's actually, it's sort of at the intersection of many different things. So I met my co-founder a lot at Stanford Business School.

He is an engineer with a lot of experience developing pretty impressive technologies, and so he's been working for a while on non-invasive blood measurement techniques. So basically using light to look at different components of the blood. And so when we met, so this was back in 2012, it was sort of the early days of wearable tech. We started to see, you know, fit bits and jaw bones on people's wrists. And we found that was really interesting from a conceptual point of view. What I mean by that is, before that, there was no way for you to have this data about you at the touch of your fingertips. And we thought, you know, this is really quite interesting, this sort of new interaction between technology and humans. Now, when we tried them, we realized, you know, this is not actually very useful.

There's not a lot of interesting insights that come out of measuring a certain amount of steps that you take every day. And so we thought about it, and we thought, you know, the concept's still good, but we need to do something that's a little bit more interesting.

And when we thought about it, the idea that there is no insight comes from the fact that actually the data, the base data that is being measured is just not that interesting. And so we came back to some of the last prior work in technology, and we decided, well, if we could measure what goes on inside the body as opposed to something that's external, like steps, then we could really start to give users something that is truly useful because then we can really observe what is the impact on your physiology of everything you do. And that's activity, but it's also stress, and hydration, nutrition, sleep, and so on and so forth. And so that's what we've been building.

Ben Greenfield (4:25)

Now it looks like basically, I'm at your website right now. And by the way, for those of you listening in, I'll put links to everything that Pierre and I talk about over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/echolabs. That's Echo Labs.

I'm at your website, and it looks like this little wearable device.

It's kind of built like a watch almost. And you have four things on the site that you say that it measures. And the first is fuel. And I'm curious what you mean by that. Is this thing actually measuring blood glucose or something like that?

Pierre-Jean (4:59)

No, not exactly. I mean, it's... So we're able, because we use this light to look at your bloodstream and we do this continuous analysis of the composition of your blood, what we're able to see is basically what type of energy you're burning and how fast you're burning that energy, looking at a proxy of respiratory exchange rates, RER.