It's that time of the year again - you know, the time when people start voicing their opinions on what the following year will bring. Health technology has had a roller coaster year, from the introduction and promise of passive nutrition tracking in the Airo wristband, to the FDA's crack-down on 23andMe for skipping the FDA mandatory pre-market approval.

But what about health tracking? How will we be monitoring our step counts in 2014? How will we track our daily nutritional quotas? Could a connected toothbrush POSSIBLY become trendy? With so many questions, here is what I think may be around the corner in 2014:

1. Passive is King:

Want to know how to keep users coming back? Create an experience that requires minimal daily effort - i.e. consider the Moves App. Moves is a simple pedometer app that runs in the background of your phone without killing the phone battery and requiring minimal user interaction. As smartphone manufactures continue to increase battery capacity, look for an increase in apps offering continuous tracking ensuring that not one data point is left behind!

In my last few health tech reviews, I've talked about the passive tracking of Moves as well as the health app titan, MapMyFitness which are both extremely well developed apps that offer different features for different types of users. The last part of this trifecta of health apps would be amiss if I didn't talk about RunKeeper, yet another amazing health tracking app.

In recent reviews of Moves and MapMyFitness I talked about the advantages of both passive tracking and GPS enabled tracking, which are extremely informative and allow you to track loads of information about how much you're moving.

There are many different fitness trackers on the market that work well and even more that aren't worth a look. The ones that are the most useful, especially for outdoor exercise are apps that utilize the GPS in smartphones to track the time and distance of your activities. As I mentioned last week, the new iPhone 5s even offer a passive tracking chip in it so it can monitor your every movement and Moves offers this same type of tracking on older iPhones and Android.

MapMyFitness has become one of the main contenders in the fitness app arena and with 20 million users, they definitely have to be doing something right. The free version is extremely useful by itself, but also offers a paid version for $5.99/month that gives you expanded capabilities such as mobile coaching and interval training.

Passive tracking. If you haven't heard this term yet, you will be hearing alot about it since the release of the iPhone 5s. That's because the new iPhone now has an M7 "motion coprocessor". This tiny new addition to the 5s means that it is now able to track all sorts of movements including sitting, standing, running, walking, biking, and more - all in the background without you needing to do anything but enable it once. While this may sound big brotherish to some, this is a great thing for health tech since it allows for much more accurate logging of your activities.

New Direction

Hi, I'm Aaron Hoffman and I'm taking over this blog from now on. Why, you ask? Well to talk about the things I'm passionate about - health tech and cooking great food. In order to understand why I'm qualified to talk about such broad subjects, the founders of Nudge decided I should write about where I come from and how I got here. It's a bit long because I'm old. Really old. I promise all future articles will be much shorter and to the point.