Jawbone's Up Wristband

As environmental and healthy living concerns are becoming bigger issues in our generation, many companies are trying to invent creative ways to help combat obesity, lack of exercise, and laziness in general.

Recently, I came across a new and rather interesting piece of technology slowly creeping its way to the market. It is a wristband called Up, made by Jawbone. Not only is it a unique piece of jewelry, but also an iPhone app that helps track the daily activity of your life and from there give advice on healthy eating, living, and exercising.

The Up wristband has several features. First of all, it does sleep and nap tracking by intelligently tracking hours slept, light vs deep sleep, and waking moments. It does overall activity tracking 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by tracking distance, calories burned, active time, and activity intensity. Food and drink tracking makes it easier to keep track of what you eat and the calories taken in. Mood tracking logs moods and discover connections that affect how you feel. Insight engine discovers hidden connections and patterns in your day-to-day activities. When you've been sitting idle at a desk or chair for too long, the wristband gives you a gentle alert as a reminder to stay active throughout the day. The smart alarm gently wakes you up in the morning at the perfect moment in your sleeping cycle and also has a power nap function that allows for the perfect catnap (precisely 26.5 minutes) . The Up wristband has a 10 day battery so you don't miss a beating step and is waterproof to make it through life's messiest or dirtiest days. What makes this piece of technology so useful is that the jack hidden in the wristband plugs into your iPhone and loads all the data made throughout the day and puts it into a meaningful form.

The app lets the user know several things. The "Me" page, or the homepage, uses bars to represent progress towards sleep, step and food goals, and daily updates on your friends, or 'teammates'. This was the aspect of this savvy new piece of technology that I really loved. You connect with your other friends, or rather teammates, that also have the Up wristband to stay updated with their progress, or in fact their lack of progress. Say, for example, you enjoyed a 1,400-calorie Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard from Dairy Queen at 11 AM on a Wednesday. The UP wristband would of course track this and would be made available to your teammates on the app. Integrating social aspects through the app serves two purposes: to motivate you through a sense of companionship and competition, and to shame you through public humiliation. So in general, seeing your calories pile up in a public forum will make you think twice about what you are putting in your body. The app also tries to make meaningful summaries from your data, like are you getting the most sleep during the week or over the weekend? Or as the weather cools are you moving about less? Knowing this information can help you make healthier decisions or maybe break unhealthy habits.

Jawbone has come out with two 'prototypes' thus far, one last year that seemed to be a flop, and one this year that has improved on the bugs and lackings of the previous model. Only time will tell us if this new piece of 'healthy living' technology will survive in an obese-ridden America. If you asked my opinion, I believe this will start a revolution. With the integration of social and great technology, younger Americans will catch on and soon it will be the latest trend for which the older, baby-boomer generation will just remain struggling to catch on to. We can only wait and see.

Here's a picture of what the Jawbone's Up wristband looks like:

Sources:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/07/jawbone-up-review-2012/

https://jawbone.com/up#design