Healthy chips

Sunnyvale, CA -We say we want to exercise, but who's got the time? Andreas Bibl, the CEO at SportBrain Inc., wants to encourage health, so he devised SportBrain, a wireless fitness device that helps cheat the clock.

SportBrain consists of a 11/2x2-inch belt-mounted tracker that monitors daily physical activity, a transmitter and docking station called SportPort, and a web interface.

SportBrain receives and records heart pulses from a monitor worn around the chest. When it is plugged into the SportPort at the end of the day, it sends recorded data to the SportBrain website, where users view results and track their daily progress.

"One of the challenges we faced designing the SportBrain tracking device was its size," says John Havard, the lead electrical engineer at Stratos (Seattle, WA), a product design and development firm. "Size also meant that power consumption was a concern."

For the small tracker device, Stratos uses a chip-on-board technology. A bare silicon die is directly bonded to a circuit board. The microcontroller from Phycomp (El Paso, TX) measures only 3x3 mm. It uses less than 20muA when active.