Wearable technology gets an upgrade with Vi- an AI personal trainer

Vi by LifeBEAM is a new AI personal trainer taking Kickstarter by storm! Current fitness wearables only tell you about how you did after your workout or simply count steps. Vi is designed to be with you while you are running and understand you through biosensing technology. Zvika Orron, LifeBEAM’s CTO, is here to explain how Vi works and how her biosensing device will help you meet your fitness goals.

Biosensors. Why’s yours great?

It started long before fitness. We knew some friends who lost their lives in the air force due to GLOC and Hypoxia, which causes pilots to pass out and crash after building too much G-force. We knew that this problem was solvable if we could identify the symptoms early and alert them before it was too late.

So, we set out to create a robust biosensing device with the latest technology that would accurately monitor blood flow and oxygenation changes in extremely noisy environments (imagine a combat pilot experiencing 9Gs of force! That’s noisy.).

The algorithm’s analysis would provide a very clear alert in a situation where the pilot should either stop building G-force or fly at a lower altitude.

Our development included the sensor and algorithm design, and also finding the best implementation of the sensor within a helmet, for both high comfort and signal quality.

In Vi we identified the most important physiological (cardiovascular), physical (activity analysis) and environmental monitoring (outdoor conditions) sensors that allow us to constantly determine the user’s status and provide the perfect advice at any stage of fitness training.

What is the little green light in the biosensors?

We use a Photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor. Basically, it’s exactly like that infrared light sensor your doctor puts on your finger to get your heart rate/oxygen saturation. Only ours is tiny optical heart rate monitor. And shines green light.

The PPG sensor works by shining light from an LED through the body’s tissue. Some of the light gets scattered, never to be seen again. A very small portion of the light is reflected back onto a light detector. When the heart pumps blood through the tissue, this changes the tissue’s behavior a little. This in turn means that the amount of light that is reflected back to the detector slightly changes. Then the heart pumps again, and again, and again, so the amount of reflected light changes, too. These small changes are measured and processed by LifeBEAM’s algorithms, to strip them of all the noise and get perfect heart rate and heart rate variability. The reason we use green light and not red or infrared light is because it has a stronger interaction with the tissue, allowing us put the LED and light sensor really close to each other. This lets the user get small, comfortable earphones that look great.

Why are the biosensors located in the ear?

The ear is an excellent body location for monitoring some physiological parameters. Since it is located in the head and close to the heart, it is rich with arterial blood flow (unlike the wrist). This elevates the signal quality of Red Blood Cell patterns which makes for cleaner heart rate signals.

Also, since the ear is aligned with the central axis of the body, it isn’t subjected to strong motion noise which may corrupt physiologic signals (also unlike the wrist). Think about talking with your hands — that can get incorrectly logged as steps in wrist sensors.

Vi is perfectly poised in the ear to capture some of the best fitness and bio measurements using the latest technology.