BodyMedia

» see bodymedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

BodyMedia started in 1999, which puts it a full decade ahead of the market it belonged to. Four people founded it in Pittsburgh, one of them Astro Teller, who would later spend years running the Google lab that builds balloons and self-driving cars. The product was an armband, worn on the back of the upper arm, and it was ugly in a way that consumer wearables stopped being able to afford after Fitbit.

It was also the most accurate thing in its category by a distance nobody has closed since. The armband read multiple channels off the skin, including heat flux and galvanic skin response, and combined them into a calorie-burn estimate good enough that the FDA classed the device as Class II. Researchers used it as a reference instrument. Weight-loss programs sold it as the honest one, because it measured energy expenditure rather than counting steps and guessing.

Jawbone bought the company in April 2013 for more than $100 million. Within weeks the reporting was clear about what had been purchased: fourteen years of sensor data and 87 issued patents, in a market where Fitbit and Nike and Jawbone were about to spend years suing each other. Jawbone kept the armband on sale for another eighteen months.

I never wore one. The device was a US retail product with a monthly subscription attached, sold through channels that did not reach Turkey, and by the time I owned anything with a heart-rate sensor in it the company had already been switched off for years. What I know about it I know from the people who are still angry about the ending.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the armband measured ~

Step counters infer activity from motion, which is why they credit you for waving your arm and ignore you for carrying a heavy bag up a hill. BodyMedia went at it from the skin. Heat flux measured how much energy the body was actually dumping into the air, and galvanic skin response tracked sweat. A skin temperature sensor and an accelerometer filled in the rest.

The trade was position. To read those channels the sensor has to sit against the upper arm, under a strap, all day and all night, which is a much bigger thing to ask of somebody than a wristband. Wristbands ask less of the wearer, and the market went to the wrist.

~ the patents ~

By 2013 the wearables business had turned into a patent business. Jawbone was suing Fitbit and being sued back, and every company in the space needed defensive weight. BodyMedia had spent fourteen years filing on multi-sensor body monitoring while nobody else was in the room.

The acquisition read as a product deal for about a month. BodyMedia stopped selling devices in October 2014. The website was redirected to Jawbone's, and the brand stopped appearing in Jawbone's marketing. Jawbone itself was liquidating by 2017.

~ the data question ~

Users got word in mid-December 2015 that the service would end on 31 January 2016, which gave them roughly six weeks. The export they were offered returned daily summaries. Everything finer than that, the minute-by-minute record that made the device worth owning in the first place, stayed on Jawbone's servers and went away with them at 11:59 pm Eastern on the last day of January.

Some of those people had been logging every day for years. The armbands themselves kept working for a few days after a final sync and then stopped, because the calorie model lived on the server and the hardware was a sensor package with nowhere to send anything. BuzzFeed ran the piece that named the problem out loud, asking who owns your steps when the company that recorded them closes. The answer that January was: whoever holds the database.

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