Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss AirPower delayed again, Samsung's new Bixby-based smartspeaker, vandalism against Waymo cars, Alexa and relationships, Netflix and movie challenges, the "other" 5G devices, selfie-wrist and more.

 

Doug in Stevensville, Michigan listens to the podcast asked: "I have a question about the GoBe2 wearable fitness band with the automatic calorie tracking. How in the world does it know what I'm putting in my mouth and how many calories are in it?"

 

Well Doug, 

It doesn’t. We actually reached out to Healbe on your behalf, but they wouldn’t give us an answer. Luckily, we have a great team of researchers that were able to hopefully help you out. 

What Healbe says their device does is track the side effects of converting food into glucose and absorbing into the body. Supposedly the tracker will track the water release and other things related to that.

Whether it works or not, who knows? In studies it’s been found to have an error rate of about 15-20%. If true that would be pretty impressive, but those are studies supplied by the manufacturer.

The tracker will also record who much you walk and your water intake too, but those things won’t help it figure out you had 3 glasses of wine, a large burger and fries, and a slice of cheesecake in one seating as opposed to a salad with no dressing, the real value is whatever proprietary technology it uses to figure out caloric intake and that’s their own trade secret.

If they really are tracking things like the water relased by cell when they process glucose, it’s impressive, especially since we also drink water and sweat, so it’d be surprising if it really worked well, but they’ve been around for a few years so maybe it does!

 

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