If you want to keep track how much you walk, bike or swim on your smartphone, you may be interested a new wearable, wireless activity tracker called the Misfit Shine.
The Misfit Shine from Misfit Wearables is an elegant, quarter-size disc that clips on your clothing and tracks your activity goals while you exercise.
Its good-looking casing is made out of aircraft-grade aluminum. The designers did not include an exterior display in order to keep the things simple. All you can see on the surface of the Shine is a bunch of laser-drilled holes with LED status lights to indicate your activity level. When you tap on the Shine’s surface, the status lights glow to show whether you’ve reached your goal.
The Misfit Shine involves a low-power microcontroller that runs some proprietary algorithms to track the steps, bike pedals, and swim strokes. The power is provided with a replaceable coin battery which lasts about six months.
The device is designed to sync to a smartphone just by placing it on the phone’s screen. The technology behind this is still a sort of mystery. The company claims that the syncing uses a special technology that does not use wireless pairing such as Bluetooth or WiFi. There is no cable or another gadget involved either.
The Misfit did not reveal its secret wireless transfer method yet. It could be some sort of high pitch sound method like “data chirping”. This is just my guess. It could be something else as well. It seems that we will have to wait for a while to we know the exact story.
If you have ideas on how the wireless communication is achieved, please post in the comments.