The stealth smartwatch – and other stress-busting gagdets
Your typical smartwatch is very keen to brag about its smartness on the dial. Step counters, weather forecasts, email notifications, even the time of day. Nowatch doesn’t trouble you with such ephemera; this device has sprung from a belief that excess data is stressful. So it displays nothing. Where you’d normally find a watch face, you’ll find a disc of malachite, maybe lapis lazuli. It doesn’t animate, light up or do anything other than look beguiling.
But while data might be stressful, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. The underside of Nowatch contains sensors that capture heart rate, temperature, step count and electrodermal activity (EDA), which are sent to an app on your smartphone. You can monitor those metrics individually if you wish, but the idea is to combine them to build up a daily picture of your stress levels. The EDA sensors, included in partnership with healthcare-brand Philips, are crucial – they measure changes in the amount you sweat, which they believe to be a reliable stress indicator.
Nowatch, from €413
Interaction with the watch is absurdly simple. There is one button, and if you want to note a moment when you’re feeling particularly blissed out (or tormented), you push it. The app records this, and later you can label that moment (calm, stressed, energised, etc) to help train the algorithm. If the watch wants to communicate with you, it vibrates twice. That’s all. In doing so, it reminds you to consider yourself and be in the present. You can set these vibrations to occur randomly a handful of times a day, and they will gradually become more driven by the wearer’s physiology. The app then offers a range of mindfulness techniques to help those stresses subside.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Rhodri Marsden
