MILES O'BRIEN: "Wearing your heart on your sleeve" is taking

on a whole new meaning. At the 2016 pilgrimage to Las Vegas for

gadget geeks - CES - wearable health tracking devices broke

into full stride, winning much more than a bit of flashy floor

space and heated hype. An estimated 500 million people

worldwide apparently now feel the need to copiously log their

steps, leaps, strokes and spins, while recording their breathing,

heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns and food intake --

just to name a few. And then of course, brag about it online.

Peter Neilson is CEO of a Denver startup called femtoScale

Miles O'Brien: Seems like there's no limit to the amount of data

people want to get, right? Would you agree with that?

What's going on?

PETER NEILSON: In wearables?

MILES O'BRIEN: Yeah.

PETER NEILSON: Blowing up. That's half of CES this year.

It looks like it's wearable trying to compute everything.

MILES O'BRIEN: Neilson's company is developing a portable

- and eventually wearable - sensor that can provide real

time readings of air quality by weighing airborne particles much

too small to see. The scale is just barely visible. I needed a

jeweler's magnifying glass to see it. FemtoScale was among

the nearly two-dozen small businesses supported by the

National Science Foundation, displaying their wares in the

Eureka Park section of CES. Eureka Park was cofounded by NSF

in 2012 as a way to showcase the "bleeding edge" technology it is

helping along. Steven Konsek is director of the Small Business

Innovation Research Program at NSF.

STEVEN KONSEK: Our program funds small businesses, mainly

startup companies that are developing game-changing

technologies that have big commercial upside.

MILES O'BRIEN: This year wearables dominated Eureka Park

- thanks to a perfect storm of technological advances: Sensors

are rapidly shrinking in size and cost; communications between

devices has improved; and so has battery life. And of course

none of it could happen without the ubiquity of smartphones -

our mobile switchboard for all things technological. San Jose-

based Stratio has shrunk a spectrometer down to palm size.

The device shines a bright light on food and medicine to

determine if they are what they purport to be. In this

demonstration, CEO Jae Hyung Lee compared counterfeit, generic

and genuine Viagra to the fingerprint-like spectroscopic

pattern of the real McCoy. It was instantly obvious which

were the imposters.

JAE HYUNG LEE: So far people were just interested themselves,

right? But now, they want to know what they're eating.

They want to know more about what they're buying. They want to know what's

going on around them, right.

MILES O'BRIEN: Clearly, exercise and nutrition tracking

alone, are not enough to satisfy entrepreneurs or consumers in

the health-tracking space. Kaustubh Kale is CEO of a Boca

Raton startup called AventuSoft. They are developing a wearable

heart monitor and electrocardiogram.

KAUSTUBH KALE: There's not a pushback anymore, you know? People are

already wearing Fitbit or any of the other wearables so they're

already accepting of these new technologies. And now as

the technology improves, you can now push it into the

medical grade domain.

MILES O'BRIEN: The wearable industry is all about heart…

and sole too. Salt Lake City-based Veristride is

developing highly "sensorized" insoles.

STACY BAMBERG: So this version right here has two big square

sensors—these are the pressure sensors -- and then underneath the

arch is where we put the electronics, so…

MILES O'BRIEN: CEO and founder Stacy Bamberg got the idea as a

way to help amputees and stroke patients in physical therapy.

The real-time data provides visual or auditory cues to help

them walk with better balance. But Stacy believes as the

insoles get thinner and more comfortable, the real-time

feedback might catch on with runners.

MILES O'BRIEN: What's the future going to be then? Are we

just going to be sensors from head to toe?

STACY BAMBERG: I think the future is this stuff is built

into our clothes. We don't have to think about it. It connects -

it sends it to our app wirelessly. We're able to get

the information we want without feeling like we got something

latched onto us.

STEVEN KONSEK: Almost all the companies that are here have

gone on and raised now private capital based on some of the

work that we've helped them do.

MILES O'BRIEN: And maybe one day this seed money will yield a

crop of better, more sophisticated sensors for us all

to wear in good health.

For Science Nation, I'm Miles O'Brien.