Finally, something to wear to the gym that isn’t spandex or sweatpants.
Wireless accessory makers Jawbone pulled back the curtain on its “Up” wristband on Thursday, marking the company’s first foray into the fast growing industry of wearable health and wellness technology.
Think of it as a Livestrong bracelet that keeps track of your body’s inner goings-on while you wear it. Working in conjunction with your iPhone, Up tracks your daily physical activity, monitors your sleep habits and quality, and also acts as a meal tracking aide. All of the data is stored within the app on your phone, synced by plugging Up’s 3.5mm jack into the iPhone earbud port.
Using a small, shock-resistant motion sensor, Up monitors multiple aspects of a user’s daily activity. It essentially acts as a pedometer, counts your number of calories burned, measures the distance you’ve traveled and separates your active vs. inactive time spent throughout the day. Sleep monitoring is similarly thorough, as the band accounts for the number of hours slept, how long it took you to nod off, even the quality of the sleep you’re getting.
Meal tracking is the least comprehensive, as the Up bracelet can’t interact with what’s on your plate directly. Instead, users are asked to create a visual meal journal, composed through taking pictures of what you’ve eaten throughout the day with your smartphone. After you’ve had enough time to digest your food, Up asks you how it all felt going down, correlating your overall physical feelings with your daily diet.
Jawbone’s Up is one of many gadgets focused on health to recently enter the market, combining wellness data measurement with a wearable technology line of products quickly becoming en vogue. Competitors like Nike, Fitbit and Lark tout similar offerings, though often either measure only one or two categories, or aren’t convenient to wear on the body for extended periods of time.
Here’s the thing: Any data collected from wellness devices are most accurate if you wear them all the time. Consider how many steps you take from the bedroom to the shower, from the bathroom to the living room. Even something as benign as pacing during a phone call could add up to more than a hundred steps. If I’m wearing a device only for certain parts of the day, I’ll be getting an incomplete picture of my overall physical well-being.
Jawbone took this into account, designing Up to hardly ever require removing it from your arm. The outer layer of the band is composed of medical-grade, hypo-allergenic rubber, keeping the bracelet sweat-proof and water resistant. In other words, it’s workout friendly, a must for a device that monitors all of your aerobic activity. The internal rechargeable battery lasts up to 10 days, and can be plugged in to a laptop via USB for charging.
It’s also easy on the eyes, a signature of Jawbone’s entire line of industrial product design (the company is best known for its line of stylish Bluetooth headsets). Instead of including a cumbersome LCD screen or an uncomfortable velcro strap, Up’s unadorned, minimalist aesthetic cuts down on bulk and conspicuousness. It’s a health device you actually won’t hate to wear.
Up launches in three sizes and seven different colors in the U.S. on November 6, with a modest asking price of $100. Find them at a number of major retailers, including Best Buy, Target and Apple stores nationwide.
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