Ear your heart out

Fitness-related wearable technology has been one of the most gifted items over the past couple of years, and now Hyderabad will soon have one of its own brands. The Flip, developed by Hyderabad-based entrepreneur Bhairav Shankar, interestingly is worn on the earlobe.

Using magnets instead of clips to help the 8 gm piece stick onto the ear, the Flip uses infrared and an accelerometer (rather than light that regular wrist-based wearables use) to track heart rate variables that give you readings for various verticals, such as blood pressure and body temperature. “We realised that the ear is a good place for a wearable, because you get the heart rate as accurate as an ECG, without wearing a chest wrap. It’s purely cartilage filled with cartilage and very thin skin tissue,” says Bhairav.

Kicking off his entrepreneurial journey with three of his friends from London’s Oxford University — where he graduated with honours in Biomedical Engineering — in 2011, Bhairav now helms a team of five that have developed the Flip.

He, however, has had some discouraging advice from the industry. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, he met with top executives from other fitness wearable companies who told him “nobody wants to make a product for the ear because for people, the face is almost sacrosanct. I stuck on because I wanted to finish what we had started, I wanted to see what the logical end would be,” Bhairav says, adding that the team is also developing apps for various purposes for different audiences, like younger people who want to track their fitness levels, and even special apps that can tell when someone is too drowsy to drive and might fall asleep at the wheel, and even predict a heart attack.

“If you’re able to tell someone that they’re about to have a heart attack before they have one, it’s a huge deal. It’s a known fact that if you can treat someone within 20 minutes of a heart attack, he’s going to be fine,” he concludes.