Jawbone device would let you wear your life on your sleeve
You walk into a bar. The lights dim and the music swells as the sensor on your wristband detects a compatible soul on the other side of the room. It also knows that you are at high risk of developing diabetes within two years.
Jawbone, the wearable devices company, is working on technology to make such scenarios possible, according to multiple patent applications that it has filed in Europe and the US.
The patents, which are being pursued by BodyMedia, a wearable healthcare group Jawbone bought in April, relate to what the company calls “lifeotypes” – unique profiles of individuals that combine real-time fitness data with other information such as health records, an individual’s mood or online purchase history.
The data profiles, which could be used for a variety of purposes from dating to predicting illnesses, are likely to have highly controversial privacy and data protection implications.
Jawbone’s lifeotypes are similar to the “master profiles” compiled by large data brokers such as Acxiom, which encompass hundreds of details about each of the more than 700m people in Acxiom’s database.
In May the US Federal Trade Commission called for tighter regulation on the data broker industry after a 17-month investigation found that they created categories that focus on health conditions such as pregnancy, diabetes and high cholesterol.
Last year the Financial Times revealed that many of the top fitness apps were selling information to around 70 third-party companies.
Jawbone declined to comment on the lifeotype technology “for commercial reasons”.
Patents do not necessarily signal that companies will launch a product, and the Jawbone documents are worded speculatively, suggesting the product “could” or “may” contain certain features.
However, Kathleen Fox-Murphy, a European patent lawyer at London-based law firm Taylor Wessing, said Jawbone’s patent applications were “pretty complex and extensive”.
“They have probably done quite a lot of technical work on the system for creating lifeotypes, and can see it has wider scope, but they haven’t necessarily developed all the features they mention.”
The system involves generating “lifeotype” profiles from pieces of data known as “life bits” and then more complex data-sets known as “life bytes”.
The patents draw analogies with how genes encode physical and other traits. In one example, they describe a life bit being the position of a person’s body at a point in time, the life byte being that they stand more than sit, and then the relevant lifeotype being “a runner with low bone density, hypertension and diabetes”.