LVL- A Step Up in the Game of Fitness Bands!
Water makes up more than half of your body weight. You lose water every minute of your day as you work or you exercise. We all know how important it is to stay hydrated, and we can’t just rely on thirst as an indicator, since we’re usually hydrated by the time it crops up.
While being busy with work, a lot of people simply forget that their body needs water or ignore the signs of dehydration. Dehydration leads to headache, lethargy, difficulty in breathing, chest and abdominal pains etc. To avoid all this, BSX Athletics has come up with LVL – the world’s first hydration monitor, or so it claims.
What is LVL?
LVL is a hydration tracker in the form of a fitness band, which shows you how much water your body requires at that particular moment. All fitness bands have the ability to keep a track on your activities and sleep. Some of them also have continuous heart rate monitoring and mood tracking. But none of them have a continuous hydration tracking, the idea of which was cracked by the CEO of BSX Technologies, Dustin Freckleton. The intention of creating a product like LVL was to make people understand how bad they can be at recognizing how much water they actually need to drink. A dehydrated person performs worse than a hydrated person, be it a physical task or mental. Dehydration affects your sleep, weight, mood, and performance.
LVL tracks your hydration, heart rate, and activity to help you enhance your performance. It then helps you in alerting how much fluid you need and what kind of performance boost you can expect. The LVL consists of activity tracking, sleep tracking, heart rate monitoring, mood tracking, and hydration monitoring.
The Features of LVL
- Real Time Hydration Notifications.
- Accurate Sweat Rate Measurements.
- Wrist Based Heart Rate and HR Zones.
- Auto sleep Function.
- Smart Alarm.
- Advanced Metrics.
- Intuitive Mood Input.
- Activity + HR +Hydration Integration.
- 24/7 Calorie Tracking.
The Technology
BSX had developed an optical sensing technology for its first product, the BSXinsight, the same has been applied in LVL, which measures lactate threshold in real time. Other traditional devices on the market use green light to measure heart rate from the wrist, but with LVL, BSX developed a revolutionary red light technology that for the first time ever can measure dehydration, while providing heart rate accuracy at the same time. The red light can measure 10 times deeper into the body than the green light, which helps us in getting an accurate measure.
The Specs
- LVL has a colour touch-screen display of its own, and it can additionally be synced with an accompanying iOS/Android smartphone app.
- The battery life is up to 4 days after a charge of 1-2 hours.
- The band will show your current hydration rate using a varies colors and levels on its OLED touch screen, which is then mirrored in the app, with suggestions on how to treat it.
- LVL band comes in three variations: Silicon, Brown Leather, and Black Leather.
How was LVL developed?
People were brought into a temperature controlled chamber where heat and humidity was balanced in a way to induce dehydration. They took human data by testing real dehydrated humans, which in turn helped them to understand how dehydration works so they could create their product in that particular manner. During the test they’re monitoring continuously using the LVL sensor technology, and then cross-checking that with blood, urine, and body weight measurements. This method guided the developers in knowing how actual dehydration occurs and while doing what kind of activities.
Through LVL, the team set out on a personal mission to make hydration a conscious part of people’s daily lives. The product has been launched on Kickstarter and will be available in the markets in June 2017.
Nisarg is the Business Development Manager at Nimblechapps, a top mobile game development company and has been with the organisation since its inception in 2014. He likes to update his knowledge on changing trends in technology and marketing and pens his thoughts regarding the same on various blogs and LinkedIn.