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.
