Everyone, get ready to stop wearing your fitness trackers in a few years and instead start swallowing them. If Jawbone, a wearable fitness tech company, is correctly telling the future, this is exactly what could happen down the road.
Jawbone’s CEO, Hosain Rahman, said at the Code/Mobile conference last week that Jawbone is currently conceiving developing ingestible health and fitness trackers that will be able to track what’s going on in your body at the deepest level. He suggested that there could be two types of such devices: one that passes through your system (to tell you what your health is like in the moment), and one that can stay in the bloodstream indefinitely (to give you constant tracking).
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
And as wild as this may sound, some ingestible trackers are already approved by the Food and Drug Administration. There is the Proteus Ingestible Sensor that monitors how much medicine is absorbed by the body through a bluetooth app, and the PillCam COLON that gives you a colonoscopy by having a light and two color video cameras within the pill. These two trackers make Jawbone’s project not look so crazy after all.
Rahman cited the challenges of our current fitness devices in the conception of this new project, saying, “The first thing you have to crack through is actually getting people to wear [the device]. If you can keep it on all the time, the amount of information you get about the user is staggering.” What better way to ensure we always have a device on than to swallow it?
Rahman eventually sees it getting to a point where your internal tracker can sync up with other external technology. For example, imagine your device letting you know that your melatonin levels are rising (i.e. you are getting tired) by dimming your bedroom lights. As another example, it could track your blood alcohol content and communicate with your car, rendering it useless until you are fit to drive. Rahman truly sees these ingestibles as having near-endless possibilities.
The strange part of all this is how ingestible trackers could essentially turn us into robots. If we only eat when we are told our bodies are hungry, for example, are we even human? It remains to be seen what kinds of ethical dilemmas these devices will put us in. But, for now, why not embrace this exciting new technology and encourage a leading wearable company like Jawbone to at least attempt such an endeavor?