Bagel Labs innovates smart measuring tape with a digital screen

We have seen people using flimsy measuring tapes to measure but as the world is going digital, Bagel Labs is aiming to cash in on it.

The South Korean start-up’s digital tape – PIE – can measure and sync with an app automatically.

Soohong Park, CEO of Bagel Labs, told TechRadar Middle East, that day of noting the measurements reading and scribbling in logbooks have gone.

Park studied mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and received a PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked for four years at Samsung Corning before leaving the company and establishing Bagel Labs in 2016.

 “More than 100 years, we have been using conventional tapes to measure ourselves and in the construction industry. Bagel Labs is innovating the way we measure by putting a digital screen on the device so that people don’t have to read the measure or take time to note it down,” he said.

With the Bluetooth connectivity, he said that it can automatically note the readings on the app and on its cloud services.

He said that PIE is popular in two different industries and its initial focus has been on digital health industry and also supplying the devices to public healthcare industries.

Moreover, he said that PIE has made it easier to keep track of waist size and body fat percentage.

The Nature journal studied and published in 2018 a relationship between the waist size and body fat percentage.

Based on the waist size, the app tells you about the body fat percentage.

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Targeting fitness aficionados

For fitness aficionados, Park said that it is easy to continue to track the progress and help consumers keep motivated in a bid to beat their fitness goals.

The weighing scale doesn’t tell the whole story and can fluctuate but he said that individual measurements of waist and other body parts can provide more exact results on the workout progress.

“Your weight can be skewed by muscle growth, water retention, or any number of other factors. PIE seamlessly stores, tracks, and analyses data points on seven different critical body parts - waist, shoulders, chest or bust, hips, thighs, biceps, and calves. You can track the changes in your body composition, such as your waist-to-hip ratio, to establish a clear picture of your overall health,” he said.

He said the optical sensor technology on the device is patent protected and runs on iOS and Android.

The iOS users can integrate size measurements into the Apple Health app, and future integration capabilities are in the works for Google Fit, Samsung Health and MyFitnessPal.

Park said that the PIE tape measurements can be connected to multiple smartphones and up to 100 members can be added to a single account.

There are other body tape devices in the market to measure such as MyoTape, Care Touch, Lightstuff, Wintape and Reidea but Park said that it is difficult to take measurements of your stomach or thighs with one hand but PIE has a mechanical design, a hook and a chip, to make a loop every easy.

There are some competitors, manufactured in China, and they also have digital screens but, he said that they don’t have Bluetooth connectivity.

“Our product is twice pricier than the competitors but our accuracy is better than others (with a maximum error of 0.5%) and has application as well.”

Spreading wings

Furthermore, Park said that the device can record a voice memo, with a press of a button, to describe what you have measured and can measure in three modes - string mode, up to about 10 feet (3 metres), wheel mode, measure up to about 33 feet (10 metres) and laser mode, measure up to 16 feet 4 inches (5 metres).

PIE is built with a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery that lasts up to 24 hours and averages 8 hours with constant use.

 “The other sector we are focusing on is fashion industries (garment manufacturing) which takes more than 1,000 measurements every day and log the data automatically,” Park said.

The company has sold 18,000 units so far since one-and-a-half years of production in Korea, the US and Japan.

“We are in talks with a couple of governments in South East Asian countries and looking for franchisees and distribution channels in the Middle East, including the UAE. This year, we are planning to sell around 20,000 units,” he said.

Moreover, he said that the company plans to collect data of the body sizes and is in talks with fashion e-commerce industries.

“Eventually, we plan to create a contact platform for body measurement data and there are parties who would like to utilise the data and use towards their applications and it will become a prized data in the future, the information is crucial for both customers and retailers,” he said.

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