Health trackers, from pedometers to smart scales, are flooding the market and there’s no place to conveniently compare all the different competitors. BioniqHealth.com is a new website to compare the features and quality of all varieties of health trackers. In the future, Bioniq hopes to give doctors the option to “prescribe” certain health devices and build a community to offer detailed reviews. Our readers can access an early version of the site with code “TechCrunch”.
Bioniq is impressive at curating novel features. It’s my job to monitor these health trackers and I learned few new things from the comparison chart. For instance, I didn’t know the Fitbit force monitored elevation levels–a feature that’d be super useful for running hills in San Francisco.
Bioniq covers the full range of the newest consumer health gadgets: smart scales, glucose monitors, neurofeedback devices, and diagnostics. CES attendees are getting early access to the site today and users will notice that it’s still sparsely populated. There’s still a lot more information and few new gadgets it could include (it does not, for instance, have features about the software aspects of the wrist bands and didn’t automatically compare the Misfit Shine to its competition). I expect that in the full release, these issues will be fixed.
The more interesting elements are yet to come. “Bioniq will help individuals to find tools and technologies most relevant to their specific needs (i.e. I want to run a marathon, I want to better understand and manage my sleep, or back pain, or high blood pressure),” writes Co-Founder Dr. Daniel Kraft to me in an email.
And, “For clinicians, who will increasingly be ‘prescribing’ apps and devices we will serve as a platform to enable technology (for the clinic, home, and wearable) to facilitate better diagnosis as well as disease treatment and management,” he continues. “In the near future I may ‘prescribe’ you exercise with a ‘fitbit’ or others most relevant to the patient, or a BP Cuff to help manage your hypertension.”
So, why couldn’t Amazon just do everything that Bioniq hopes to do? “Amazon is a great marketplace but the essence of these new technologies for health and wellness is not just buying them. It’s how they are used, what happens with the data, and who is involved,” Kraft argues. “The features soon to emerge on Bioniq will quickly clarify that Amazon is barely related to what we are building for our users. E-commerce is just one piece of what we are doing.”
Health trackers are becoming a lot more popular, and if Bioniq can exploit their unique place in our lives, it’ll have provided a very useful utility.