The world of smart belts has always been a bit on the sparse side, with a small selection boasting fairly limited functions. Samsung introduced a new player to the scene early this year at CES, however, by revealing the new Welt smart belt alongside other wearables and an entire smart clothing line called “the humanfit”. The wearable has a number of advanced functions that could set it apart in a burgeoning market, such as activity tracking and figuring out why it fits a user the way it does. The belt can even tell if an expanded belly is due to a user gaining weight, a recent meal being far too big or the user eating something that didn’t agree with their system and caused them to become bloated. Sporting a MicroUSB port for charging, the belt will use the same cable as most phones and last about a week on a single charge.
New reports reveal that the part of Samsung’s experiment house C-Lab that was behind Welt will be striking out on its own as an independent company. All of the employees involved, who had a year off from their normal engineering duties to create the wearable, are no longer Samsung employees, officially, and will be testing the waters as the people behind a startup. Welt will be following in the footsteps of a few other C-Lab properties that have broken off from Samsung to pursue life as independent startups, taking the technology they created during their time at Samsung with them.
Thus far, a price and release date for Welt have not been nailed down, though it’s assumed that the price will hover around the high end for fitness trackers. Along with the normal features found in a wrist-based fitness tracker, along with a few extras. The clincher, of course, is that it’s all going to be attached to an actual belt, built in collaboration with Samsung Fashion. Naturally, this means that the belt itself will likely be a fairly high-fashion item, though the ticket price may end up depending more on the materials, since Samsung Fashion isn’t exactly up there with the Guccis and Pradas of the world.