9-Axis Sensor Stars in Movea Wearable

Movea, a company that specializes in motion processing software, has crafted a wearable wristband reference design for sports and wellness applications in collaboration with Texas Instruments and the contract design house Xm-Squared. The sensor, announced today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will be jointly marketed by Movea and Xm-Squared and features connectivity courtesy of TI's CC2541 Bluetooth low-energy system-on-chip.

As Movea's first reference design for wearables, the G-Series uses its Motionsport embedded software library, which includes all the normal activity monitoring algorithms for sports and wellness wearables plus functions for determine whether the wearer is standing, sitting, walking, or running. Original equipment manufacturers gain access to Movea's motion sensing algorithms from an application programmers interface that includes step count, energy expenditure, distance traveled, and sports performance metrics such as running speed, pedestrian cadency (steps per minute), and biking cadency (revolutions per minute).

Based on a InvenSense's nine-axis micro-electromechanical system chip (including a three-axis accelerometer, three-axis gyroscope, and three-axis magentometer), the G-Series utilizes only the accelerometer today.

"The reason we use a nine-axis chip in the reference design, but only utilize the three-axis accelerometer today, is to realize the other reference design applications in the future without having to redesign the board," Ava Pagneux, marketing communications manager at Movea, told us. The G-Series is also the world's most accurate and laser sensor solution for the always-on "quantified self" applications. "We ran benchmarks between the G-Series and the five most popular activity monitors and found it to outperform each in nearly every category."

For activity classification, for instance, Movea claims a success rate higher than 95%, along with the industry's lowest error score (less than 1.7%, versus an average of 6.3% for competitors). The reference design's always-on energy efficiency gives an estimated 10-day battery life between charges by consuming about five milliWatts while activity monitoring.

"Our design is also the first wearable to automatically detect sleep, performing sleep analysis every night with the accuracy of a PolySomnograph," Pagneux said.

Today, hospitals use PolySomnography -- based on EEG -- to detect wakefulness, sleep, and deep-sleep cycles, but Movea says its device can achieve pressure sensors comparable results by analyzing the data stream from an accelerometer alone.

"PolySomnography is the gold-standard for measuring sleep patterns in hospitals, but using our device achieves very similar results," Pagneux said. As for the partners' future plans, "the next generation of our reference design will couple with medical devices, such as heart rate and body-temperature monitors, to realize a new generation of e-health applications."

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