In this week’s SmartBody and Quantified Self roundup, we’ll be featuring a Quantified Self app that closed a Series A funding, an ex-Apple CEO’s tracker launching in the Apple store, and a sensor that measures stress while gamifying the art of conscious relaxation.

MyFitnessPal‘s healthy appetite for growth

The popular health and fitness service for web and mobile has raised $18 million in Series A funding by by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation by Accel Partners.  John Doerr, a venture capitalist at KPCB, and Andrew Braccia, a partner at Accel, will both be joining the company’s board.

This round of funding will be used to accelerate hiring and global growth, evolve its team, analytics, product and international presence.

“The bootstrapped environment has given MyFitnessPal a foundation to focus on the primary driver of our business, creating a fantastic user experience to help our 40 million members reach their health and fitness goals,” said Mike Lee, Co-Founder of MyFitnessPal.  “With this funding, we are now perfectly positioned to expand our product, team and audience reach and empower consumers throughout the world to reach their health goals, build healthy habits and live healthy lives.”

Since its launch in September 2005, MyFitnessPal has reached more than 40 million users worldwide, and has seen an increase of 1.5 million new user per month in the past year.

Misfit Shine

Fitness trackers are usually sporty-looking by nature, so it’s kind of hard to wear them inconspicuously with formal attire.  Good thing ex-Apple CEO John Sculley, who was blamed for firing the late Steve Jobs from Apple, co-founded a little tracker dubbed the Misfit Shine. It comes with a number of accessories to fit the ever-changing needs or your wardrobe.

Misfit Shine is a small, quarter-sized, aluminum-encased gadget that uses a high precision 3-axis accelerometer to track your activities such as walking, jogging, running, biking, swimming and sleeping.  It uses CR2032 battery which means you don’t have to charge the device as the battery last to up to four months.  After that, you can just change the battery — it comes with a replacement kit.

There’s an accompanying iOS app to help you make sense of all the data collected by Shine, as well as help you achieve your fitness goal.

Misfit Shine is available for $119.95 and the device is expected to start shipping this month.  The good news is that Apple Stores in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong will now carry the device, while stores in Europe and Australia will start carrying the device by September.

Checkout our Smart Devices and Gadgets Collection on Springpad!

The PIP

Getting into a relaxed state and maintaining that relaxed state is quite a difficult task, especially when you’re bombarded with various stress factors.  Good thing a little biosensor that measures a person’s stress level, as well as help him achieve a relaxed state, has been successfully crowd-funded on Kickstarter.

Dubbed The PIP, this little sensor pairs up with an Android or iOS app to let the user know how stressed he is.  A user just holds The PIP between his thumb and forefinger, and it measures the Galvanic Skin Response.  The results are transmitted via Bluetooth to the accompanying app.  The app then performs complex GSR analysis systems to give accurate feedback for all users of the PIP regardless of skin type and environmental conditions.

The PIP is not all about measuring how stressed a person, is but it’s more about learning how to deal with stress through relaxation games.  The PIP has three mobile games to teach the user how to relax, and the more they play it, the faster they will be able to go from a stressed stated to a relaxed state.  The games included are Relax and Race wherein the objective is not to fly faster to win but the most relaxed racer would win, The Loom wherein players need to turn winter into summer by being relaxed, and Lie Detective which is a mobile version of a lie detector test.

If you were one of the lucky ones to pledge on Kickstarter, you’ll receive your very own PIP during the first quarter of 2014.

 
Checkout our full collection of SmartDevices over on Springpad.