How Gadi Amit is putting the future of wearables under your skin

11 Sep 2015
Jason Madara

This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Gadi Amit designed the Fitbit, the Lytro Camera and Google's Modular Phone. Now he wants to redesign your body.

In 2013, two San Francisco-based entrepreneurs, Chris Bruce and Mathew Spolin, contacted a local product designer called Gadi Amit with the idea of making a wearable device. "They had some core sensors and a general idea for the branding," Amit says. "But, as is usually the case with wearables, most of the sensors brought to us were raw inventions from a medical lab. The end users are not medical professionals." In fact, in the case of Bruce's and Spolin's device, the Sproutling, the end users were babies.

When Amit (pictured above) starts working on a new project, he first makes a series of prototypes using clay, foam and wood, and starts playing around with various shapes and forms. His team works with pen and paper before anything is rendered on a computer screen. It's a process that differs from the approaches of other designers, who often take a more analytical, quantifiable approach. What's important to Amit is the serendipity that comes with the process of discovery. "I'm an outsider in the tech world," he says. "I work with some of the most cutting-edge technologists on the planet, and most of them aren't used to working with designers. Some have a sort of superiority complex towards us, something along the lines of, 'We went to engineering school, we're used to telling a designer exactly what to do.' This sense of rational dominance, as if tech is developed better by setting priorities through analytics or tech constraints, is more important than the cultural human aspect of the design. I'm more humanistic, serendipitous, emotional."

Jason Madara

When it came to the Sproutling, Amit took a series of plaster baby legs and calves, and developed prototypes made of foam, cardboard and, later, 3D-printed objects with Velcro. He then tested them with real babies, having them wear the devices for hours on end. "We ended up placing the sensor not on the wrist, but on the calf, with an adjustable, replaceable, elastic strap," he says. "Why? Because babies triple in size in their first year."

Amit is behind some of the most celebrated design products of the past decade: the Fitbit; the Lytro Light Field Camera, a pocket-sized camera that can focus images after they are captured; and Google's Project Ara, a modular smartphone which can be configured by swapping in different CPUs, screens and cameras. These products are characterised by their rounded edges, soft plastics, bright colours and sturdy materials. It's an aesthetic that, in a sense, is the antithesis to the masculine lines and cold metal that dominates Apple's hardware design.

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The wisdom of the hand

"My process is more akin to sculpture than it is to engineering, analytical thinking or machining metals. It's artistic, chaotic and very hands-on," Amit says. "I found out that it's a process that's exceptionally effective, not only on exterior forms and devices, but also for the interior architecture of electronics. The ability to create an internal layout of electronics is a sort of secret ingredient, and it's behind a lot of project success stories we created such as Lytro, Fitbit or the Ara."

Sproutling's wearable band has a heart-like form that wraps around a baby's ankle. It tracks and predicts sleep patterns and optimal sleep conditions by measuring their body temperature and movement. Room temperature and noise levels are also monitored. Data is visualised using a colour-coded system that is transmitted to the parent's smartphone and a base station, which can also wirelessly charge the device. "I call it a glanceable user interface," Amit says. "It's important that it doesn't require an alphanumeric data flow at a glance. When the base station flashes a red light it effectively means, 'Go and check the baby'. It's allowing the parents to be connected to the state of health of the baby. It allows them to live more predictable lives. When parents become more familiar with natural patterns, it reassures them that everything will be OK."

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Sproutling took nine months to design. Bruce and Spolin then took the prototypes and usability studies they had developed with Amit and presented them to investors. On January 29, 2015, they raised a $6.6 million (£4.2m) round of funding.

The son of architects, Amit was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1962. After completing military service, he enrolled to study industrial design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and graduated in 1989. He moved to San Francisco four years later to work at design firm Frog, later becoming vice president.

In 2000, Amit left to co-found his own business, NewDealDesign. He wanted to create a smaller, inter-disciplinary company that followed his personal design philosophy, which he calls "the wisdom of the hand". Its early portfolio was eclectic: a rehabilitation device for athletes called Game Ready; MicroVision Nomad, a wearable similar to Google Glass; and the AVC Soul portable CD player. Its first big successes were the Palm Zire, which came out in 2002 and sold more than a million units, and the NetGear Platinum II modem.

In 2007, Amit was approached by Fitbit. The startup's founders, James Park and Eric Friedman, had, says Amit, "a circuit board and a vision". At the time, wearables were clunky pedometers with poor user interfaces. Fitbit wanted a focus on wellness, not fitness. "Some of the early wearables were a way to flaunt the ego," Amit says. "One of the biggest discoveries we made when we researched the market was that many users, specifically female ones, don't want to show their stats. They didn't want to be seen as douchebags who flaunt the fact that they walk a lot. That insight really helped the Fitbit in the early days."

The first Fitbit, the Wellness Tracker, clipped on to its owner's clothes. It measured steps, calories burned, distance and floors climbed. It was faithful to Amit's design philosophy: a device that was present but didn't need to announce itself every five minutes. You could put one on and forget about it.

A body designed for wearables

Jason Madara

Gadi Amit thinks that in a few years we could be wearing up to ten devices on our bodies and clothes to monitor and organise our lifestyles. "How will we interact with this stuff?" Amit asks. "And the thinking in my team was that we need to establish some kind of cross-platform user interface where we co-ordinate data from all the devices."

Gadi and his team started tackling this problem. They came up with a conceptual device with a glanceable interface that would connect all such data trackers. They called it Project Underskin.

At first, Amit wanted to create a new wrist device. "I quickly changed my mind when I realised everybody else was also doing a new wrist wearable," Amit says. His solution? A chip that would be embedded under the skin. "It was something that would be concealed but would also be on us at all times and everywhere we went," Amit says. "It was a controversial decision. Embedding electronics under the skin was considered too invasive. One of the designers said he felt queasy about it. He had just tattooed his arm from shoulder to cuff-line. I just asked him, 'How can you be sensitive to that?'"

Amit and his team researched body augmentation. "We found out how common it was throughout history," he says. "Five hundred years ago, it was natural to insert jewels into one's body. As we move into the digital era, it will feel natural to have a chip under your skin. There are already a lot of implanted devices - heart defibrillators, insulin implants, identity chips..."

Project Underskin is based on a digital tattoo implanted in the user's hand. Amit's team came up with a two-node circuit board: one on the palm; the another on the upper side of the hand. "We found it was stable in terms of readability," Amit says. "It doesn't change much whether you close or open your hand."

The tattoo can send near-field communication signals to unlock doors and authenticate credit-card users. It can track location and movement and display information such as blood sugar levels or heart rate. It won't convey alphanumeric information, but rather codify it geometrically. The user gets to decide what is displayed and how it is transmitted. Amit calls it an introvert user interface. "It's completely personal," he says. "No one knows what it means, because the context is made in your mind. That's the beauty of it."

Project Underskin started as a provocation but, after its announcement, Amit claims he has received interest from various companies and individuals. "It probably won't come to fruition for a while, but it will be imperative to build something like this," he says. "The proliferation of digitally enhanced devices is just going to be there and it will be impossible to control them. We can't just carry our phone everywhere we go."

João Medeiros is science editor at WIRED. He wrote about memory experts in 09.15