Patent: Personal Wellness Monitoring System

According to the World Health Organization, health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Wellness goes beyond health and takes into account different details of the person such as the manner in which they live and how lifestyle impacts their well-being. Wellness is an umbrella term for social, emotional, physical, spiritual, intellectual and occupational well-being. Being free of diseases or being in a happy state of mind doesn’t take off the burden of wellness forever as this is a dynamic process that keeps changing depending on the way we live, what we eat, how much we exercise, duration of our sleep and more. Our present lifestyle gives little space for wellness in our life and there are many of us who don’t realize where we measure up in a scale of 1 to 10 when it comes to wellness. Luckily, we have technology backing us in this aspect of life where a small device helps in tracking our sleep quality, calorie intake, physical activity measures and much more.
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Using electronic devices to monitor our nutrition, health, wellness and fitness levels is becoming common but we cannot comment on their quality or precision as most of them are still in their initial stages. These devices do count the number of stairs climbed, steps taken, heart rate, oxygen levels in the blood, respiration levels, body temperature, calories burned and so on but we are not in a stage where all the information acquired are complete, correct and exact. The patent here is extremely useful for day-to-day life wherein we are provided with a fitness, health, wellness and nutrition monitor that captures, monitors and tracks numerous wellness and health factors that include food intake, vitamin and mineral content, composition of consumable products, physical activity, heart rate, blood pressure, electrocardiogram (EKG), body fluids acidity, glucose levels and stress. The monitor designed helps in tracking the nutritional content in every meal or snack consumed daily, energy consumed and energy dissipated and total energy count thereby suggesting any changes to the nutrition, exercise or lifestyle routines that can improve fitness, wellness, health and nutrition levels.

The foods consumed are put through image analysis and quantitative volume determination, two of the three techniques (molecular optical fingerprinting is the other one) that help in monitoring nutrition, fitness, wellness and health levels. Apart from total calorie value of the food, information regarding complete nutritional content, vitamin and mineral content and total energy may be derived with image-based analysis or molecular optical fingerprinting. The images captured may be 2D or 3D and they are matched to reference images in a database in terms of shape, color, size and texture. The monitoring device comes up with practical suggestions to balance calories, fulfill nutritional requirements and surpass activity recommendations. The monitoring device tracks the food, liquid and supplements intake noting calorie content and matches it with the required number of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients required for healthy body functioning finally coming up with helpful tips and tricks to achieve optimal wellness.

Energy spent is the sum total of the calories burnt on performing various activities such as walking, running, exercise and also includes that of sleeping, sitting and talking. Energy spent is accurately measured using an accelerator, gyroscope, pressure sensors detecting elevation differences, GPS, etc. Other important factors such as age, height, weight and sex may be included as part of the health and wellness assessment index calculation. The device provides data, feedbacks and recommendations to the user which would enable the user to understand positive or negative deviations from projected values and help him/her adjust these accordingly. This invention comes at a stage where our lifestyle practices are far away from that recommended and health status is highly discouraging. Obesity and diabetes are growing on to be global epidemics, heart attacks are affecting adolescent and younger adults and depression is taking a toll on our younger generation. Wellness is lost amidst this chaos and we stand stranded. Maybe, a device such as the one designed here is the go-to one for all of us to bring back the sunshine in our lives. The patent was published on April 2, 2019 and for those of you interested in knowing the intricate details of the device discussed here, you can read about it from any of the links given below, all of which are authentic patent sites:
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United States Patent & Trademark Office: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=3&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=102&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=%22human+body%22&s2=fitness&OS=%22human+body%22+AND+fitness&RS=%22human+body%22+AND+fitness
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World Intellectual Property Organization: https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=US239904133&tab=NATIONALBIBLIO&office=&prevFilter=&sortOption=Pub+Date+Desc&queryString=FP%3A%28personal+wellness+monitoring+system%29&recNum=1&maxRec=16
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European Patent Office: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?II=0&ND=3&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=20190402&CC=US&NR=10249214B1&KC=B1