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TECH NEWS

LVL, a wearable hydration monitor, nears $1 million on Kickstarter

This wristband tells you when you need to drink more water to prevent dehydration

The LVL (pronounced level) wristband from  BSX Technologies is hailed as the first wearable device that can detect when you’re dehydrated. It’s currently on Kickstarter and with 9 days remaining of the campaign it has amassed a staggering $991,632 from 6,307 backers. 

Why is it so popular? Because the compact wristband can tell you when you need to drink, removing the guesswork about how much and how regularly you need to consume fluids during exercise. It is well understood that you need to remain hydrated during a bike ride to retain optimum performance, but it can sometimes be tricky for people to know exactly how much fluid you need to consume.

level band.png

This Texas-based company looks to have found the solution. Using a proprietary sensor that can determine blood’s level of concentration built into a small wristband,  it can monitor hydration levels in the wearer. It can use information from the sensor to provide real-time hydration notifications and even sweat rate measurements, and the company has developed a partner app to help access the data.

“Unlike traditional devices on the market that use green light to measure heart rate from the wrist, we have spent the past four and a half years developing a revolutionary red light technology (actually near infrared light) that for the first time ever can measure dehydration, while also providing industry leading heart rate accuracy at the same time,” explains the company. “Our red light sensor originates from the world of medical devices where accuracy is king. It can measure 10 times deeper into the body than green light can, which allows us to see more and measure it more accurate.”

Aside from measuring your hydration levels, the LVL can perform other tasks normally provided by fitness bands. So it can monitor your heart rate, track your sleep quality, calories burned, the number of steps and even your mood.

“LVL simultaneously tracks your hydration, heart rate, and activity to help you optimise every workout, training set and race. It then prompts you in real-time, alerting to exactly how much fluid you need ( based off of current levels and sweat rates ) and what type of performance boost you can expect,” says the company.

level 4.png

The LVL has a small OLED touch screen to display all the information with side buttons to access the menus. It uses Bluetooth to sync to a compatible smartphone to use the company’s own app, and can also be connected to other bike sensors.

If you like the sound of the LVL, you can still get your hands on one by pledging $129, with shipping anywhere in the world and delivery scheduled for July 2017. The LVL will retail for $199 when it goes into normal production.

Take a closer look here www.kickstarter.com/projects/lactate-threshold/lvl-the-first-wearable-hy...

David worked on the road.cc tech team from 2012-2020. Previously he was editor of Bikemagic.com and before that staff writer at RCUK. He's a seasoned cyclist of all disciplines, from road to mountain biking, touring to cyclo-cross, he only wishes he had time to ride them all. He's mildly competitive, though he'll never admit it, and is a frequent road racer but is too lazy to do really well. He currently resides in the Cotswolds, and you can now find him over on his own YouTube channel David Arthur - Just Ride Bikes

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17 comments

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Nick T | 7 years ago
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If only humankind had evolved some way to instinctively know when they require food and water, perhaps they wouldn't have faced extinction all those years ago

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amawby | 7 years ago
1 like

That was a very long and complicated way of saying "the very best the product can do is match the benefit of drinking enough electrolyte in the first place".

If you model the benefit of a system such as this, assuming it works perfectly - i.e. gives you an instantaneous, perfect measurement of hydration status - then it still does not and cannot give you any greater performance benefit than a buzzer that simply reminds you to drink at suitable intervals.   If you put any assumptions at all into the model about imperfect performance (delays in measurement, innacuracy and so on) then it cannot even achieve this!

This is because of the delay in between you taking in fluids into your mouth and them getting into the rest of the body.  No matter how perfect your sensor is, it cannot accelerate this process.

 

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AdamisFirst | 7 years ago
0 likes

Hopefully I can help clear up some of this, as one of the guys very passionate about this product and helping out...

First, hydration levels (over-hydration, and dehydration) DO impact your health, performance, and nearly every aspect of your life. It's not as simple as people make it out to be, well we've lived this long without it, just go off "thirs" and "urine color". Hopefully people who say this have the same arguements against cars and would never consider buying one, due to having legs and feet :).

When you dehydrate, your blood volume drops (blood is highly concentrated of water), which is not only represented in blood, but tissue, which is also highly concentrated of water. As your blood volume drops, your heart rate increases to counter it, which is known as cardiac drift. Many distance runners can very easily see this graphed. We have studied many thousands of subjects over many, many tests, to identify conditions and complications that come from less than optimal hydration levels. Change is tough for some people, and some find it hard to believe if we've lived this long, why would we need this. Well, we DON'T NEED this, but like many other forms of tech that have come from science and study, which drastically increased human life expectancy (met with doubt) this is another big step.

Further, hydration isn't even just a matter of water, sweating causes sodium loss, which only drinking water will eventually start to provide no benefit:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267797/

And more on thirst:

  • Thirst doesn't typically do much for people drinking alcohol who are dehydrating
  • Thirst doesn't tell you the volume of sweat and sodium loss or what volume to drink and if it's working. It's not just water you need, depending on your condition.
  • Thirst doesn't tell you when you're 1.5 hrs into a 2 hour hike to camp and finished your canteen, if you are okay to finish, or need to find more water asap, or risk things as simple as headaches to much worse.
  • Thirst doesn't tell you when your child that's out on the sports field, or elderly parent, is dangerously dehydrated.
  • In high heat and high intensity exercise, you can lose multiple pounds of fluids via sweat in a matter of 20-30 minutes. You may barely be starting to feel thirsty, but be WAY beyond the point of being able to catch up.

If it were just a matter of thirst, you would rarely ever hear about the many conditions related to dehydration people suffer and die from. If someone is thirsty, maybe it's a good sign they should drink, but exactly HOW dehydrated are they at that point?

We're not saying you will die without this, or using scare tactics, but educating people is important. The fact is, there are many related imporper hydration complications, all the way to the point that people can and do die from hydration/heat issues:
http://kendrickfincher.org/kendrick-fincher-bio/

Our tech isn't a gimmick, we've proven it, with our last successful Kickstarter and device that reads muscle oxygen levels, used by many athletes. IBM Watson and US Olympic athletes use it all over the world:
https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2016/07/27/internet-of-things-wearable...
The device can be found here:
www.bsxinsight.com

It's also been 3rd party validated, by many, with no involvement by us. You can find it published in places like the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research:
http://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Abstract/publishahead/Wearable_lactate...

On top of the smartwatch features, and hydration levels, we have the highest standards of optical heart rate monitoring, with greater than 3bpm rms error. It's not your typical heart rate standard people are used to with optical tech. In simple terms, you can read the red light vs. green light article:
https://medium.com/bsxtechnologies/red-light-versus-green-light-74fdd5fe...

But what about looking at urine color for hydration levels? Some ask this, convinced of its accuracy. Well, it's something used by the military and they will tell you how much it comes up short for them, as well as many other common reasons, like:

  • Urine color doesn't reflect lost salt that has to be replaced from sweating
  • Urine color doesn't reflect over-hydration potential until it's too late
  • Urine color during an evening of drinking alcohol isn't likely to tell you anything about your dehydration
  • You can't always check urine color when hiking, at a public event, a long bike ride/walk, many many other scenarios
  • If you are monitoring someone else (elderly, child, ect) getting them to pee on queue for you to see isn't really optimal
  • If you are very actively sweating, in the heat, people can lose multiple pounds in a matter of 20 minutes, how do you check your pee color every few minutes to know when you reach a dangerous level and should stop?
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vonhelmet | 7 years ago
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Since I had to factory reset my garmin it's decided to beep every 5 miles. I use it as a reminder to take a gulp of my drink. Every 15 miles I have something to eat. Job jobbed.

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Canyon48 | 7 years ago
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Cool, can I get an electronic device to tell me when I'm hungry, when I'm tired and when I need to go to the loo...

Nah thanks.

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mike the bike replied to Canyon48 | 7 years ago
1 like

wellsprop wrote:

Cool, can I get an electronic device to tell me when I'm hungry, when I'm tired and when I need to go to the loo...

Nah thanks.

 

Oh dear Mr Wellsprop, you don't seem to have grasped the significance of this wonderful gadget.  You should try to remember that today's yoof have been spoonfed from birth to a degree that staggers the imagination.  

Not allowed to play outdoors or climb trees or swim in a river, fed only factory-produced foods, kept well away from all bacteria (including beneficial types), given trigger warnings before they can study poetry of a sturdy nature, taken to a doctor at the first sniffle, never had a Christmas present that didn't need batteries, educated for 13 years but can't change a plug.  And more, much more..

How can these people decide for themselves when it's time for a drink?  Get real man!

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Darkhairedlord | 7 years ago
3 likes

It reminds me of when I got stopped for drink driving.

They said they were going to breathalise me, I said what's that?

"its a bag that tells you when you've had too much to drink....."

"FFS, I just married one of them!"

 

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hsiaolc | 7 years ago
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When I first heard it, I thought what a ludicrious product.  I sitll believe so, however, I am surprised it hit $1M!!!

I whole heartly believe my body can tell me when I am thirsty and needs a drink unlike heart rate, power, etc etc that I need monitoring to indicate to me what reading they are. 

 

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PeterM | 7 years ago
1 like

 

A fool and his money...e.t.c. e.t.c so on and so forth...

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cdamian | 7 years ago
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I would have bought this, but the saving on the retail version is minimal if you account for shipping.  And then you still have the usual crowd funding risk.

I'll wait until it shows up in retail and order from a site that allows free shipping.

But I am interested in it, even if it is just a not very accurate toy. Checking your pee will certainly not be more accurate or convenient  1

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Gasman Jim | 7 years ago
1 like

Amawby is right. This is nothing more than a useless gimmick. I think they're trying to calculate dehydration by measuring changes in haematocrit. Various companies (such as Masimo) have been trying for years to produce an accurate non-invasive device to measure this and hence calculate  Hb level for use in anaesthesia & critical care, and they simply aren't accurate yet. I'd go with Yorkshire Wallet's suggestion above.

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amawby | 7 years ago
5 likes

2 things about this mean that it cannot be of any use to help a cyclist (or other athlete) with hydration.

1. it uses near infrared as the sensor.  These are notoriously innacurate, espeically without an invasive (i.e. analysing a blood sample) test to baseline the system for an individual user.  Without this, they can be throw off by many, many effects - subcutaneous fat, vascularisation, skin tone, fit to the skin, ambient light...

2. by the time a hypohydration effect has occurred that this system can detect, it will be about 90 minutes too late to start drinking fluids to correct!  That is how long it takes in between drinking something and your blood plasma osmololity returning to euhydration.

The best thing you can do is remember to drink; start early and keep doing it.  If you want a gadget to help, just get a countdown timer of some sort and take a drink and set it going again each time it gets to zero.

There is a heap of medical and sports science literature out there to confirm this.

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gsavill90 (not verified) replied to amawby | 7 years ago
2 likes

amawby wrote:

2. by the time a hypohydration effect has occurred that this system can detect, it will be about 90 minutes too late to start drinking fluids to correct!  That is how long it takes in between drinking something and your blood plasma osmololity returning to euhydration.

 

And presumably when this occurs you feel thirsty...

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tritecommentbot | 7 years ago
1 like

Just had an email from Knog saying that people have been recieiving wrong sizes and that people are complaining that their bells don't work or sound the way they should. They want you to take videos of the bell and you ringing it and send to them if you got a dodgy one!

They haven't even started UK ones yet - 7 months later, and that's just something relatively simple, without electronics, from a company that's already established and has cash flow.

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NPlus1Bikelights | 7 years ago
2 likes

After 2 examples of already solvent and established companies screwing up crowdfunding projects - namely  Blaze's Bunner and Knog's Oi! - I'll wait until future tech is out in retail shops and pay full price which will likely get me a unit before the backers get it and with full consumer rights if it doesn't work as described on the tin.  

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tritecommentbot | 7 years ago
2 likes

I would really, really, really be dubious about the performance gain claims. As a guide I use the rule that I can lose 2% of bodyweight in water and still not have any loss in performance. 

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Yorkshire wallet | 7 years ago
6 likes

My cheap alternative to the last picture is go to the toilet before you go out, judge the colour, have a drink.

Does it also tell you when to go to the toilet? 

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