UC Davis taps Healbe for a wearable-enabled health study

GoBe 2 wearable

The University of California, Davis (UC Davis), Foods for Health Institute, has signed a five-year agreement with Healbe to help validate whether advanced personal fitness trackers can be used to help bring precision-based health solutions to consumers.

For the study, the university is employing the Healbe FLOW technology, which enables the automatic and non-invasive monitoring of human calorie intake, hydration and emotional state. Healbe has also contributed 20 of its GoBe 2 “Smart Life Band” fitness trackers to collect and analyze data based on nine health parameters, including calorie intake, calories burned, energy balance, water balance, stress level, emotional state, heart rate, sleep quality, and distance traveled.

According to Dr. Sara Schaefer, associate director of Children’s Health, Foods for Health Institute, UC Davis, and the principal investigator for the research, the study aims to help researchers understand and develop tools to determine what makes humans unique in their daily and long-term dietary needs.

“We are seeking to validate wearable technology and explore its use and value in a research context,” said Dr. Schaefer. “We constantly scan the market for new technologies in this area and reached out to Healbe as it offered algorithms to objectively measure different aspects of health, including dietary intake, hydration and stress, on a very personal level.”

In addition, UC Davis and Healbe are also working together to learn how wearables can be used to help different segments of the population, including the possibility of creating new interfaces for people living in different parts of the world as well as those who have specific physical and health conditions such as pregnancy, diabetes and heart disease.

“This collaboration with UC Davis is very important to us, offering not only the opportunity to continue to develop our Healbe FLOW technology and future GoBe consumer devices, but to explore new approaches and applications for our health monitoring solutions,” said Artem Shipitsyn, CEO and co-founder of Healbe.

GoBe 2 is the first wearable that automatically measures calorie intake, hydration levels and emotional state non-invasively through users’ skin.