Author: JT

While fitness trackers and bio monitors remain popular, mental health has become a new wearables focus.

Until now, physical activity has been leading the way in the wearable technology ecosystem, as many people use health and fitness trackers to be able to measure their activity and their progress on that level.

Now, a new product is changing the direction of wearables by looking into tracking stress levels every day.

The goal is not only to allow people to be able to see how their stress levels are occurring with each passing day, but also to provide them with a wearable technology based tool that will let them better manage those daily stresses. The device in question is called Spire. It consists of a small clip-on device that can be attached to a bra strap or to the waist of a wearer’s pants. This allows the device to track breathing patterns in order to determine whether the wearer is tense, focused, or calm.

If the wearable technology detects too much stress, it sends an alert to the user’s smartphone.

Moreover, if the wearer’s breathing speeds up too much, the Spire wearables, themselves, will buzz. The alert sent to the smartphone reminds the wearer to take a deep breath. According to the co-founder of the wearable device, Neema Moraveji, “That simplicity of the feedback is what makes it so applicable and what makes it so actionable in daily life.” Moraveji also added that it is something that is very easy to work into a busy schedule. It is realistic and practical because “You can take a deep breath without stopping what you’re doing, without distracting from what you’re doing.”

Moraveji explained that while tech as a whole may help to contribute to the typical stress levels, these days, wearables may help to provide a solution as there really isn’t any practical escape from technology as a whole. She said that this is one of the driving concepts that helped to develop Spire, as they asked themselves “how could technology change and improve our state of mind?”

The app to which the wearable technology is linked allows a user to track and compare their stress levels and activity levels from one day to the next as well as overall.

This trend is heading around the world as Diwali shopping in India broke mobile records.

While the holiday shopping season is only just getting started in the United States, India has already had a major wave of its own m-commerce season as Diwali brought a tremendous number of shoppers to their device screens to pick up that perfect gift.

According to UCWeb, the holiday shopping traffic across India broke the 75.5 percent mark this year.

UCWeb is the company behind the top mobile browser used in India, as it holds onto a market share that is greater than 54 percent in that country. This makes that company uniquely able to understand the increases that are being seen in m-commerce activities throughout the year and at times of holiday shopping such as during Diwali.

According to the company’s managing director in India, Kenny Ye, “The numbers of users who visit Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal via UC Browser in the month leading up to Diwali 2015 increased over 75 percent compared with last year.”

People in India are steadily increasing their use of m-commerce, particularly during festive seasons.

Ye went on to explain that consumers in India are “embracing shopping on the go” to a growing degree. They are finding that there is a great deal of opportunity available to take advantage of the time they have while they commute or on lunch breaks, for example, in order to pick up the gifts they need for festive celebrations. It helps them to save time and to be able to find some great ways to save money on what they want to buy.

That said, this use of mobile commerce for Diwali in India has been met with some resistance in that many people are saying that it is pushing people to think of this important time on the calendar in an exclusively commercial sense, when it is supposed to mean a great deal more.

This closely mirrors the sentiment of many people who will be using m-commerce to help them to get ahead in their Christmas shopping during the holiday season in the United States. It will be interesting to see what other trends follow the same paths between the two countries and their top gift giving holidays.