Naked Labs’ home fitness scanner captures your entire body in 3D

Naked Labs is unveiling what it calls the world’s first 3D Fitness Tracker. It scans your entire body using a mirror and a scale, capturing your weight and the outline of your body. It then uses that information to calculate your percentage body fat, and it shows you if those trips you’re making to the gym are paying off — even if you aren’t losing weight.

The Naked 3D Fitness Tracker is a sophisticated machine with an Intel processor, Wi-Fi, a turntable, a companion mobile app, and scanning technology that resembles Microsoft’s Kinect body-sensing technology for video games. It’s the ultimate example of the “quantified self,” a movement in which people seek insights about themselves through analytics. The quantified selfers have inspired our age of Fitbits, Apple Watches, and all the other devices that capture our exercise habits.

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Farhad Farahbakhshian, CEO and cofounder of Naked Labs, said in an interview with VentureBeat that he wanted to create something to inspire people who are going to the gym and want to see tangible results. He found that many people were discouraged because they weren’t losing weight after many weeks, and so they were dropping out of his spinning class. What those people didn’t realize, he said, was that their bodies were changing dramatically.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Naked Labs enables people to track the smallest changes in their bodies, such as where they are losing fat and where they are gaining muscle.

“We track how your body changes over time,” Farahbakhshian said. “And your body changes far quicker than you see in a scale or a mirror.”

The device works when you step on a scale in front of the mirror. A turntable spins you around and scans your body in about 20 seconds or so. Then it wirelessly transfers the data to the cloud, so you can see the results on the app on your phone. And yes, it captures everything, including the full dimensions of your private parts. If you don’t want to actually see those parts, you can scan yourself while wearing underwear (probably the tightest underwear or exercise clothes you can find).

Farahbakhshian said that the combination of weight and volumetric data allows the company to get the same data that precise hydrostatic body fat calculators use when they immerse you in a body of water. (The water that you displace is measured, and, when compared to your weight, you then get the calculation of body fat.)

The tracker is available for preorder now at $500.

“We believe the only fitness metric worth tracking is progress. With the Naked 3D Fitness Tracker, people can immediately see how and where their bodies are changing,” said Farahbakhshian. “The Naked 3D Fitness Tracker is transformative in its ability to motivate people to achieve their health and fitness goals through visualizations of their progress on their 3D body model.”

Farahbakhshian is an electrical engineer who spent a decade designing chips at chip maker Maxim Integrated Circuits. He’s also a fitness buff and taught spinning classes at the gym.

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“I was exposed to the January rush and what motivates people and what makes them stay on a regimen,” he said. “80 percent of them stop coming to the gym after six weeks. I wanted to understand it, and why the 20 percent keep coming back. I found people who saw physical progress would stick to a regimen and a diet. Those who worked hard and did not see it would not stay.”

Farahbakhshian cited research that showed people who witness visible progress after beginning a fitness regimen are much more likely to stick to their routines. With Naked 3D Fitness Tracker, people can truly understand their bodies. A heat map on the app shows changes to your body geometry over days, weeks, and months. Significant changes are highlighted so you can see where you are gaining muscle or losing fat. You can even see a time-lapse account of your full fitness journey.

Naked Labs uses an Intel Atom quad-core processor, an Intel RealSense depth-sensing camera, a 63-inch high mirror, and a 14.5-inch turntable. It can measure weights up to 330 pounds. No one can see your body scans unless you share them, and the app comes with fingerprint authentication for added security.

Naked Labs, which has 10 employees, was founded in 2015, though Farahbakhshian said he had been thinking about it for five years. The company raised a multi-million dollar seed round from New Enterprise Associates and others, and it is in the midst of raising a round now. There are competing scanners at gyms that cost more than $10,000.

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