Massive Health acquired by Jawbone to bolster the software of its wearable computing devices

In an effort to beef up the software end of its wearable computing efforts, Jawbone has acquired app and data company Massive Health. We’re hearing that the acquisition was made for a number in the ‘mid to low tens of millions’.

Massive Health was co-founded by user interface expert, Aza Raskin. Raskin’s official job title was Chief Vision Officer after the exit of CEO Sutha Kamal early last year. Raskin, the son of noted human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, also founded Humanized. 

In 2008, he joined Mozilla where he was the Creative Lead for Firefox. Raskin also worked on projects like Jetpack and the Firefox Mobile concept.

Massive Health was founded in 2010 and funded in early February of 2011. Now, almost two years later, the company has been snapped up by Jawbone.

As it has attempted to join the wearable computing arena with its UP devices, Jawbone has come across a series of roadblocks surrounding quality control. Now that it is starting to get those under control, it makes sense that they would look for ways to make their software that much better. Combining the hardware prowess of Jawbone with the heavily user-interface-centric software of Massive Health makes a lot of sense.

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Massive Health has demonstrated its ability to make software that people use and that is effective in helping to gather and quantify data. The Eatery, one of its early apps, gathered around a million food ratings in its first month or so of availability. It then used that data to visualize the eating habits of its users around the world.

As the Massive Health team integrates with Jawbone’s current software team, expect to see the way that devices like the UP gather and leverage data improve.

Read: Quantified Self and the Internet of Things: Everyone is collecting your data, so why shouldn’t you?