Lumo Lift review

VERDICT & RATING

The Lumo Lift earns a rating in this review of 6.5 out of 10.

Rating of the Lumo Lift:

• 5 on a 1 to 10 scale (10 = best)
• Once the Lumo Lift technology platform learns how to track dynamically changing “active posture” on a seamlessly comprehensive, full day basis that includes walks, runs, workouts, housework and chores, sleeping, even posture at the dinner table so that one does not get rebuked at holiday family dinners, etc., it might earn an additional positive rating point
• If team Lumo Lift somehow imbues their company culture with some real fashion style in product design, they might earn another 1/2 or full point; as of now, this review downgraded the Lumo Lift one full point for a boring design that does nothing fashion-wise for today’s lifestyles
• If the Lumo Lift team can somehow figure out how to dramatically enhance the user experience (UX) by enabling the device to perform accurate, real-time, dynamic posture tracking without requiring so many ad nauseam “align” procedures, then this review would upgrade its rating by a full point or a point and a half – yes, this feature is that important to the future of the posture tracking industry

OVERVIEW

The Lumo Lift package contains the oval Lumo Lift sensor to be worn under your clothing, square magnetic clasps in silver and black for the front of your clothing, a magnetic bra clasp, and a magnetic connection USB charging dock.

Functionally, the Lumo Lift sensor detects forward, backward, and sideways movements and then algorithmically calculates if your body is slouching, according to parameters that indicate unhealthy body posture.

The great thing about this product concept is that body posture is really quite important to good long term health, especially nowadays with so many people spending 6+ hours a day hunched over a mobile laptop or workstation computer. There is a vicious cycle associated with bad posture. Over time, poor posture can lead to back pain. Back pain can then lead to greater durations and excesses of poor posture, which then leads to more back pain.

The Lumo Lift works optimally when you are wearing tight fitting clothing and it rests snugly against your body. You are supposed to place the Lumo Lift underneath your shirt or blouse about 26mm below your collarbone. To do this, you remove the square magnet clasp from the front of the Lumo Lift and place the main device next to your skin, and then replace the magnetic clasp against the clothing that is in contact with the front of the Lumo Lift.

DESIGN

There is nothing fancy-schmancy about the design of the Lumo Lift. The main piece, the “posture tracking” electronics piece is encased in a symmetrically elongated oval piece of highly durable, monochrome polycarbonate plastic.

The second piece to the Lumo Lift is the small, square magnetic clasp plate that holds the posture tracking electronics piece in place under your clothes.

The Lumo Lift does not have an on-off switch nor any kind of display. To obviate the need for these extra functions on such a minimalist device, the Lumo Lift’s designers engineered it to automatically switch off when it is placed on a flat surface. That’s some pretty nifty design and engineering.

To wake the Lumo Lift, one squeezes the device for 3 seconds and when the green light comes on, the Lumo Lift is ready to engage in the syncing process with your smartphone. Clicking the Lumo Lift device once starts its Bluetooth chip communicating with your nearby smartphone in order to establish the continuing link between your smartphone and the device.

Once this Bluetooth link is made, the Lumo Lift presents a suite of videos about how to wear your Lumo Lift, what is good posture, and what the device’s various vibrations signify.

This is one of the few rather uniquely savvy features of the Lumo Lift, a quick and simple, prompted user experience (UX) learning mode to which the entire wearables industry should pay apt attention. Kudos to team Lumo Lift for this easy peasy lesson in product smarts right out of the box.

Some analysts and users note that the Lumo Lift magnetic clasp smartly permits customers to personalize the device by applying small magnets from an arts and crafts store to a custom fashion accessory frontispiece to the tracker element underneath your clothing. Good idea.

However, I call foul ball on that move.

Why didn’t Lumo Lift smartly create a posture tracking fashion wearables ecosystem and community from the gitgo that offered customers of all sexes a full suite of dozens of attractive magnetic clasp jewelry, cameo or intaglio brooches, stylish buttons, and fashion accessory options to front for the tracker behind your clothing?

To their credit, Lumo Lift does make it possible to buy additional square frontispiece plates for USD20.00. However, once again we hit the brick wall of price-performance mediocrity and an almost total lack of fashion design style and sizzle in the Lumo Lift team.

Luckily for Lumo Lift, this is easily rectified in the future by contracting with an innovative industrial design firm and hiring a couple of in-house jewelry and clothing accessories designers from one of the world’s fashion capitols would help Lumo Lift get over this bump in their product roadmap.

PERFORMANCE

The Lumo Lift does its job at posture tracking at an above average level for most users, along with acceptable step tracking, but the user community vote tallies on the accuracy of its calorie counting performance are not decisively in just yet.

However, an objective overall performance assessment would need to include the fact that a worrisomely large percentage of Lumo Lift users report spotty accuracy, distracting and annoying user experiences, lots of quirky glitches, bothersome recalibration requirements, and very poor customer service.

To be fair, Lumo Lift has attempted to address some of these issues in a redesign of the magnetic clasp and an aggressive online marketplace customer support outreach program, which was needed exactly for the very customer dissatisfaction reasons given above.

Now, properly aligning your Lumo Lift against the flesh of your torso or snugly against your undershirt or underblouse or bra is critical to obtaining the optimal smart posture advice and user experience performance via the Lumo Lift app on your smartphone. As such, correctly calibrating your Lumo Lift depends on your initial alignment during each and every period in which you’ll be wearing the device for an extended period of time under the same piece of clothing and in the same general body position.

To calibrate the Lumo Lift, you simply press the device 2 times to put the Lift into “Align mode.” The Lift then vibrates 3 times to gather in a baseline metric of your posture that the device uses for comparison purposes the remainder of the day.

You can use the Lumo Lift app to set your posture alerts based on your personal preference. For example, you could set the Lumo Lift to vibrate gently after you’ve been in bad posture for a user selectable time of 1 to 30 minutes.

This all means that every time you change from sitting down to standing up, or visa versa, you need to recalibrate your Lumo Lift to a new posture alignment that corresponds to your new and best initial standing posture.

If you forget to do this, which is likely the case in at least one-half of all new alignment opportunities as you and your body move to different alignments many dozens of times throughout any given day, the Lumo Lift will buzz to remind you to align the device again to correspond with your new body position.

To align the Lumo Lift, for instance, when you stand up or sit up straight from a previous body position, you simply click the device twice by pressing the magnetic clasp down against the device underneath your shirt of blouse or dress and the Lumo Lift will respond with 3 vibration buzzes to indicate that you have successfully aligned the device to your new body position.

The nicely put together, simple Lumo Lift app shows you the total hours of “good” or “remarkable” or “slouchy” posture you experienced each day, incorporated into a daily calendar lineup of good posture hours for at least the last week of your life. It also shows the number of posture power hours. The app also shows you your number of activity steps taken each day for the last week of your life, as well as the distance taken and calories expended during those steps.

That said, imagine needing to recalibrate your smartwatch, activity tracking band, smartphone, or your tablet every time you want to use it and you’ll get an idea of why Lumo Lift needs to find an out-of-the-box solution to eliminating this bothersome UX requirement or this platform will continue to suffer from user experience (UX) performance issues.

Now once the Lumo Lift is properly calibrated, the electronics inside the compact device senses your posture changes, your motion throughout the day. To be more proactive about improving your body posture, there is a Lumo Lift coaching mode to vibrate you into action to correct your slouching to optimal posture.

This is a simply procedure in which you press and hold the Lift for a few seconds, after which it will vibrate one time, and thenceforward, it will remind you to correct your posture every time you are out of optimal alignment. The Lift can be turned off by pressing and holding the Lift again until it vibrates 2 times.

Perhaps some of these issues are to be expected with a new consumer electronics platform for posture tracking. These issues also may be a sign of a Kickstarter boosted tech startup company learning the ropes the difficult way, one that needs to cross the chasm into the next stage of its development cycle when they come out with their next generation product/s and improve their customer service.

BATTERY LIFE

The Lumo Lift is rechargeable. It recharges to 100% in about 2 hours, after which it will operate for about 5 days, depending on how many times you change your posture, of course. The charging dock cradle only connects to a USB port, so you’ll need to plug it into your computer’s USB port or a USB enabled adapter that you can plug into an electrical wall socket. The Lumo Lift app on your smartphone shows you the percentage of battery life remaining on your Lumo Lift device, as there is no display on the device itself, but there is an LED charging status light.

COMPATIBILITY

The Lumo Lift is compatible with iOS 7+, including iPhone 4S+, iPod Touch 5^th gen+, iPad 3^rd gen+, iPad mini 1^st gen+, and iPad Pro. It is also compatible with Android 4.3+, including devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S3, S4, S5, S6, S7, the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, 3, 4, and 5, Samsung Galaxy Tab 4, Google Nexus 5, 6, 5X, and 6P, the LG G3, G4, G5, the HTC M8, M9, M10, and the Moto X 2^nd gen, Moto X Pure, and other Android smartphones. With an appropriate dongle, sold separately, the Lumo Lift also supports Windows PCs running versions 7, 8, 8.1, and 10.

PRICING AND GENERAL AVAILABILITY

Overall, the Lumo Lift appearance, fit, feel, and productivity present smart health and wellness wearables bargain as an essential for users with existing back issues looking for a device to help them self correct, but at USD79.99, it’s price-performance point is not a win-win for the majority of the market right now.

CONCLUSION

This review’s overall assessment considers the fast pace of innovation across the entire wearables industry. So it’s difficult to imagine that a single device dependent app with good, though spotty accuracy (according to many users in the Lumo Lift community of customers) and little else in the way of compelling top-tier wearables tech features can withstand the test of the torrid pace of current wearables technology innovation as well as an unforgiving global consumer marketplace that does not like to be locked into single purpose tech platforms.

From the perspective of this review, then, Lumo Lift’s best strategic opportunities await their crafting sensible partnerships and ecosystem compatibility with the rising number of highly innovative, emerging growth smart apparel and smartwatch accessory platforms that are both presently in the industrial design and engineering pipeline or on the drawing board.

In other words, unless Lumo Lift comes out with a blockbuster next generation technology platform that dramatically expands the landscape of just the posture tracking scenarios, this review recommends they hightail it to their nearest major consumer electronics or wearables tech apparel firm in an attempt to integrate their tech into a more compellingly comprehensive and fashionably smart clothing accessory line.

Let me give you an example of a possible Lumo Lift future. Lumo Lift offers a different product, Lumo Run, which senses and tracks things such as changes in forward velocity, pelvic rotation, vertical bounce, and pelvic drop from side to side. Why do I or any other user have to buy yet another little puck of a smart device, and keep track of it and not lose it and charge it, ad nauseam.

An all-in-one Lumo Lift product, with all the multidisciplinary sensors and algorithmic intelligence built-in to support both semi-static posture at work and at home as well as during training and fitness activities is an eminently feasible solution.   Especially if the Lumo Lift team hires a small coterie of high end big data analytics and university level mathematicians to figure out the next generation of artificially intelligent, neural network, deep learning ‘dynamic posture’ algorithms?

The roadmap is already there. Today’s wearables customers are getting inundated with product, with warranties, with monthly service bills, with apps, with data plans, with features, with customer service issues, ad nauseam. One sweet Lumo Lift product that does all that Lumo Lift and Lumo Run do now, plus next generation sensors and posture algorithms that are both 2x to 3x more comprehensive across the entire human body as it paces through 98% of all of life’s varied daily circumstances is not a moonshot, as they say. It’s just over-the-horizon smart design and engineering.

In the battle of the multi-sensor-enabled, multi-featured tortoise and the single purpose hare, you can bet that the entire apparel industry will start to aggressively incorporate posture tracking technologies in the smart shirts and blouses and smart pants and smart socks of tomorrow. In fact, it’s already baked in the cake with today’s level of intelligent textiles prototypes that are pushing the envelope in the highways and byways astride Lumo Lift’s current playground.

Meanwhile, if you or your loved one are concerned about your posture habits, then the Lumo Lift posture tracking platform is a good and helpful, though certainly not stellar start down the road to better overall health and wellness through smart wearables tech enabled optimal maintenance of your ongoing posture awareness.