BodyMedia was a medical and consumer technology company headquartered in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...

. Incorporated in 1999, BodyMedia developed wearable body monitoring systems. In April 2013, BodyMedia was acquired by Jawbone for an estimated $100 million.

History

Wearable device

BodyMedia staff published some of the first research on wearability of devices in 1998 and detecting activity context using accelerometers in 1999 at the 2nd and 3rd IEEE sponsored International Symposium on Wearable Computers. The BodyMedia informatics group made available a large anonymised human physiology data set for the 2004 International Conference on Machine Learning, running a Machine Learning Challenge. They published about their very large data set and data modeling methodology at the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence conference in 2011 winning the IAAI Deployed Application award.

Clinical history

Between 2001 and 2005, BodyMedia provided healthcare professionals with metabolic assessment and

behavioral therapy Behaviour therapy or behavioural psychotherapy is a broad term referring to clinical psychotherapy that uses techniques derived from behaviourism and/or cognitive psychology. It looks at specific, learned behaviours and how the environment, or o ...

products for the treatment of

obesity Obesity is a medical condition, sometimes considered a disease, in which excess body fat has accumulated to such an extent that it may negatively affect health. People are classified as obese when their body mass index (BMI)—a person's ...

diabetes Diabetes, also known as diabetes mellitus, is a group of metabolic disorders characterized by a high blood sugar level ( hyperglycemia) over a prolonged period of time. Symptoms often include frequent urination, increased thirst and increased ...

, and CVD. BodyMedia have been used in hundreds of clinical studies. The U.S.

Food and Drug Administration The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA or US FDA) is a List of United States federal agencies, federal agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Health and Human Services. The FDA is respon ...

(FDA) classifies BodyMedia as a

Class II Medical Device Due to the many regulations in the industry, the design of medical devices presents significant challenges from both engineering and legal perspectives. Medical device design in the United States The United States medical device industry is one ...

. BodyMedia was demonstrated to be accurate in comparison to the

doubly labeled water Doubly labeled water is water in which both the hydrogen and the oxygen have been partly or completely replaced (i.e. ''labeled'') with an uncommon isotope of these elements for tracing purposes. In practice, for both practical and safety reasons ...

method for measuring energy expenditure per day. The mean absolute-percent difference per-person per-day in Kcalories was less than 10%. It was also shown that the standard WHO GPAQ survey underestimates physical activity bouts of at least 10 minutes. The clinical and research software and armband were marketed under the “SenseWear” brand and have since been used e.g. to estimate exposure to air pollution in combination with other sensors.

Consumer products

BodyMedia sold a consumer software product for

armband An armband is a piece of material worn around the arm. They may be worn for pure ornamentation, or to mark the wearer as belonging to group, or as insignia having a certain rank, status, office or role, or being in a particular state or condit ...

hardware starting in 2001. A consumer web site using BodyMedia armbands was branded; run in the USA by “Dot Fit”. In the UK a consumer web site is branded and run by “Ki Performance”.

References

External links