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The adventure of new ventures.
AUSTIN, Tex. — Among the hundreds of interesting start-ups trying to get noticed at the South by Southwest festival, quite a few are entering the relatively new realm of wearable tech — wristbands, watches, rings and the like that identify users and collect data about them.
One example — and a finalist at the SXSW Accelerator Awards on Sunday night — was Nymi, a product from a company called Bionym. It is, according to Karl Martin, co-founder and chief executive, the world’s first electrocardiogram-detecting wearable — a wristband that authenticates identity based on cardiac rhythm. Each person’s heartbeat is unique, he said: “We’re just reading that beat from your extremities.”
The Nymi is a slim band made of rubber and silicon — it comes in black, white or burnt orange — and has a magnetic clasp. “We typically need two or three heartbeats to authenticate someone,” Mr. Martin said. After that, the device knows the wearer and can communicate through Bluetooth with any smart device. “Think about your computer, smartphone, tablet. You won’t need a password anymore — it will always be unlocked if it knows it’s you,” he said.
Nimy started taking pre-orders in September; six months later, it has taken more than 8,000 and is encouraging developers to write applications so that their devices can interact with the Nimy. More than 7,000 have signed up for the developer program.
Now employing 25 at its headquarters in Toronto, the company raised $1.4 million in seed financing last year. It is appealing to consumers first and then plans to offer the product to enterprises, Mr. Martin said. It’s a “consumerization of I.T. strategy,” he said. “If the consumer demands it, the business will adopt it. You’ve seen it with the iPhone and Dropbox.
Not truly wearable — but nearly so, considering how attached we are to our phones — is the Wello, a health-monitoring device in the form of a sleek case that snaps onto your iPhone and gives a picture of your health at any moment in time. Open the app, hold the phone horizontally for a few seconds, and you see a graphic showing the results of heart and lung function tests, along with blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, electrocardiogram, heart rate, temperature and respiration rate, said Hamish Patel, co-founder and chief executive of Azoi, the company that makes Wello. It comes with a spirometer, a tube the user blows into to test lung function.
The research and development was done in India, but Mr. Patel said the company was in the process of moving to San Francisco. It took his team two years to develop Wello, which is now available for pre-order for $199. Mr. Patel said the idea was to monitor your health regularly and know when something is amiss so you can intervene early. It also syncs with fitness wearables Fitbit and Jawbone, and uses that information to understand the user’s health. “It will give you data that will help you make better lifestyle decisions,” he said.
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