Wearable Technologies Innovation World 2013 winners

The 2013 Wearable Technologies Innovation World Cup top 20 finalists were recently announced at this year's Wearable Technologies Conference in Munich. The winners were selected from 600 entries from 69 different countries.

At the official award ceremony, Moticon was declared the overall winner and WT Innovator of the Year for its intelligent insole, OpenGo Therapist.

OpenGo is what German startup Moticon claims to be the world's first fully integrated and wirelessly connected sensor insole, measuring plantar pressure distribution. Designed to be cost-effective and as thin and flexible as a normal insole, the sensor-laden insole can be used for patient monitoring and direct feedback to patients with respect to gait training and overload prevention.

But it can also provide direct training feedback in sports. It can operate in live mode, transmitting data through an ANT+ radio to a mobile device in real-time (an ANT+ enabled USB flash drive plugs into the phone), or in recording mode where it stores data on an integrated flash memory. The insole features 13 capacitive pressure sensors as well as a 3D acceleration sensor and a temperature sensor.

Created in 2011, Swiss startup Biovotion AG took the top rank in the Healthcare & Wellness award category for its Biovotion Vital Sign Monitoring (VSM) platform. Wearable health monitoring has a big market to address in ageing Europe and research labs such as Imec, Fraunhofer or CEA-Leti regularly come up with interesting concepts to monitor vital signs.

The Biovotion VSM platform wraps around the patient's upper arm for unrestricted and continuous monitoring, say for chronic illnesses or for temporary patient-at-home monitoring. Integrating a multi-wavelength optical reflection sensor in contact with the skin, an accelerometer and a temperature sensor, the arm-band can measure blood oxygenation and cutaneous blood volume, skin temperature and heart rate (and its variability). Activated via a smartphone, the platform shares the data in real-time and automatically uploads it to the cloud for semi-automatic analysis and for caretakers to be alerted when set specific conditions occur.

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