Bluetooth low energy health and fitness wearable allows parents to keep track of their children’s activity, exercise, and sleep patterns via smartphone app

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that Shanghai, China-based science and technology company, Putao Technology, has selected Nordic’s multiple award-winning nRF51822 Bluetooth® low energy (previously known as Bluetooth Smart) System-on-Chip (SoC) for its new PaiBand children’s health and wellness wearable.

Unlike other wearables for children that are designed to prevent children getting lost or separated from their parents, PaiBand has been designed to focus on growth, emphasizing sports and nutrition and providing feedback to parents to help them understand their child’s health and wellbeing better. The wrist-worn PaiBand device monitors activity, heart rate, and sleep, automatically wirelessly synching the data to Bluetooth 4.0 (and later) smartphones and tablets—via Nordic’s nRF51822 SoC Bluetooth low energy solution—where from the app dashboard the parent can monitor their child’s progress.

In the PaiBand app, a parent enters their child’s height and weight information which alongside their activity, sleep, and heart rate data from the PaiBand wearable allows the app to provide customized recommendations on diet, exercise, or how much rest the child should be getting, as well as a daily ‘life report’. The PaiBand wearable can also act as a motion control device for playing a Parkour-style game in the PaiBand app. The child can control the game through a range of jumping and crouching motions.

The IP67-rated water resistant wearable employs a rechargeable 70mAh Li-Poly battery, allowing the device to operate for between three and five days in typical use between recharge, thanks in part to the ultra low power consumption of the Nordic SoC.

Nordic’s nRF51822 is a powerful and flexible multiprotocol SoC ideally suited for Bluetooth low energy and 2.4GHz ultra low-power wireless applications. The nRF51822 is built around a 32-bit ARM® Cortex™ M0 CPU with 256kB/128kB flash and 32kB/16kB RAM. The embedded 2.4GHz transceiver is fully compliant with Bluetooth 4.2, the latest version of the Bluetooth specification of which Bluetooth low energy is a part.

“This is our first time working with Nordic, and the experience has been a good one,” says Jerry Zhao, Senior Director of Hardware Engineering, Putao Technology. “The nRF51822 SoC gave us an ultra-low power Bluetooth low energy chip with powerful performance, and based on the requirements of our product it was the right cost/performance balance. What is more Nordic has provided very good technical support.”