Multifunction Personallized Signature Pedometer Watch

Agreed; what I think to be an ideal solution would be a band with a USB interface that presents itself as a standard mass storage device, logs its data to one or more files stored on it, and its configuration is also accessible in the same way. NAND flash is cheap - and one of these could also double as a USB drive in the same way as a lot of media players. (Incidentally, I think adding a few extra sensors to an existing wearable media player platform wouldn't be all that difficult; now you get a band that can play music too...) That in no way precludes supplying an app that can automatically parse that data and generate pretty graphs etc.

Instead, the only products available from the big companies seem to require some proprietary app to interface them and give very little control of their data - the user's own health data - to the user, which is certainly disappointing and agrees with the trend of devices getting more and more locked-down against their users. They seem to be going out of their way to make it hard to "extract" the data from their devices, almost as if "plug it in and copy the data over" scares them.

I specifically mentioned "big companies" because what I find somewhat ironic is that it's the cheap, unbranded far-Eastern manufacturers who are more likely to come up with products based on existing standards than invent their own proprietary protocols. For example http://www.amazon.co.uk/Multifunction-Personallized-Signatur... is very similar to the concept I have in mind, and it's a completely non-cloud-based device, but the reviews show users complaining that it's "too difficult to use".