With a simple touch, this gadget analyzes your skin and tells you how to improve it

Pop quiz: what is your body’s largest and fastest-growing organ? It’s your skin, dummy! Apart from keeping your blood and guts from leaking out, skin regulates your body temperature and protects you from a variety of external hazards. Long story short, your skin is pretty darn important.

As we enter the age of wearable tech, fitness and health-related gadgets that can monitor heartbeat and track your workouts abound. Fitbit and Apple Watch are great for giving users a glimpse of their overall health, but despite physically touching it to get a reading, none of these wearables are monitoring your skin.

In beauty-obsessed South Korea, one startup hopes to fix that – all while capitalizing on both the burgeoning worldwide internet-of-things (IoT) movement and the booming domestic skincare sector. WAY has devised a portable gadget that can monitor a user’s skin condition and surroundings to give them an instant snapshot of their largest organ’s health and tips for how to improve it.

A trio of sensors

When we fall down or spend too much time in the sun, our skin bears the physical signs of damage. But on a day-to-day basis, our skin health isn’t always clear. Understanding our skin condition is further complicated by environmental factors like temperature and humidity. That’s why WAY uses three sensors: one to check the current UV index and another to gauge humidity, combined with a bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) sensor that can read moisture content and estimate oil levels within the skin tissue itself.

Getting a skincare reading with WAY is as simple as touching the device to your face and opening up the companion smartphone app, compatible with both Android and iOS. It connects via Bluetooth LE and has a battery life of one week. Recharging is done via a micro USB cable (in the land of Samsung and LG, something most Koreans certainly carry around).

WAY is powered by an ARM Cortex-M0 CPU. It’s similar in size and shape to a makeup compact, has a vibration motor and LED light for alerts, and is available in two color combinations: black and gold or white and silver.

This functioning WAY prototype shows the sensors on its underside.

Dermatologist in your purse

The startup, based in Seoul’s swanky Gangnam district, hopes to position itself as a dermatologist in your purse – and it even has one as a co-founder.