Jawbone has acquired two innovators in mHealth: Visere and Massive Health.
Visere designs hardware and apps for a wide variety of markets. Massive Health is known for Eatery–a crowd sourced app that encourages healthy eating.
Visere and Jawbone have already collaborated on UP: one of only three Jawbone products and the only one involved with health. UP is a system comprised of a bracelet and an iPhone app.
The bracelet is meant to be worn 24 hours a day. It monitors your sleep time and daily activity. The data can be put into the app by plugging it into the headphone jack.
Additionally, the user can add meals and mood. The system will use this data in a variety of interesting functions. You can find a full detailed review of UP on iMedicalApps.
UP analyzes your mood and other patterns to determine factors that affect you personally. It will alert you if you have been idle for too long. It will use your movement to determine the best time in your sleep cycle to wake you to feel most refreshed. It will even help you take a power nap of optimal length.
Massive Health’s app, Eatery, allows you to take a photo of your food and rate its healthiness. Then it is uploaded and other users rate the healthiness of your meal as well. It uses this information to help you track your eating habits. You can look at trends about when you eat unhealthy foods or what foods you tend to eat unhealthy foods with. The analysis is similar to the kind done by UP but specific to food and with the added benefit of crowd sourcing. Both UP and Eatery have a social aspect to them so you can compare yourself to your friends.
The reason for the acquisition is clear: Jawbone is not finished with development and innovation with UP. In the acquisition of Massive Health and Visere, Jawbone has acquired talent that will be focused on taking UP to the next level.
Sources: Jawbone, Visere, Massive Health
