There are a lot of ways to start living a healthy life.  You can go about it the traditional way, watching what you eat and start exercising.  But with all the hustle and bustle around you, it’s easy to lose track of your goals.

There are now apps to help remind you of your set goals, and even fitness trackers to give you a boost in the right direction.  But are those enough?

Conscious Clothing

A team of three designers have developed a prototype of a technology that analyzes a person’s breathing volume – or how much a person inhales or exhales.  Conscious Clothing is a wearable device made up of sensors and strips wrapped around a person’s chest that measures breathing volume and transmits the real-time data via Bluetooth to a paired mobile app, and data is stored in the cloud.  This is a great addition to existing fitness trackers as it delivers a more holistic approach to living a healthier life.

Conscious Clothing received a $100,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to further develop the device.  The device would likely land in the hands of researchers, regulators, and academics sooner than consumers as they would be the one tracking pollution trends.

“With people wearing these new data-collecting devices, researchers will be able to see and understand the relationships between varying levels of air pollutants and individual health responses in real time,” Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which is part of NIH, said. “This is a big step toward treating and, more importantly, preventing disease and illness.”

Whistle

People aren’t the only ones who need to be monitored for daily activities and sleep patterns, as even our furry pals need the watchful eye of technology.

Whistle is a hi-tech, wearable collar that monitors your dog’s activity, such as walking, running around, playing, resting, eating, hanging out with you, and even pooping.  This device monitors the dog’s activities 24/7 and has an accompanying app so you can track how your pal is doing even when you’re away.  The great thing about this device and app is that it collects information over time and stores it in the cloud, and with the collected information you can create reports, which you can submit directly to your vet so everything can be better analyzed.

The app aims to convey what the dogs can’t tell us by analyzing millions of data points per animal, looking for patterns or “vectors” such as restless sleep or interrupted play that could indicate that something isn’t right.

“Dogs tend to hide their pain from you,” Whistle CEO and co-founder Ben Jacobs said. “They will act how their owners want them to act. Dogs will run a marathon with their owners until their paws bleed. That’s not an indication of health. That’s an indication of loyalty.”

So if you’re furry pal is willing to do anything for you, buying a $99.95 device that could potentially improve your furry pal’s life shouldn’t be hard decision for you to make.

W/Me

Fitness trackers may be ubiquitous today, but we have yet to see a wearable product that can track your mental well being, until now.

W/Me is a wristband that measures the autonomic nervous system by tracking how a person reacts to physical factors.  This is then be analyzed, and based on your agility and ANS age, the wristband will be able to tell you what your current mental state is, or how you’re feeling.  ANS age is the approximate ‘age’ of the user’s nervous system, which is independent from biological age and is based on breathing, stress, and other factors.  This can reveal how good a person is at dealing with stress over the long term.  It’s like a hi-tech mood ring, only better.

Make sure you check out our collection of Self-Quantified Gadgets on Springpad!