Keeping track of how time is spent has been one of man’s keen concerns throughout civilization. While these inherent desires are still in man, the methods through which these objectives are reached have greatly improved.
Time keeping has graduated rapidly from sand glasses to using analog and then digital watches. The increase in mobile technology has introduced what is known today as smartwatches. These watches are small computers wrapped around your wrist, they can do what your phone does, in a more handy manner.
With smartwatches, the use of watches has now gone past keeping track of time, to keeping track of the working of our body vitalities and environmental conditions. Smartwatches now keep track of atmospheric temperature and pressure, keeping track of body vitalities such as heart rate, calorie level, blood pressure, sleep tracking. This is like taking the doctor’s kit with you as you walk along the street, or engage in an activity like running, jogging, biking or engaging in an exercise.
This has proved to be really handy for sportsmen and athletes who have to monitor their vital organs and track their exercise rates. Also persons who are on an exercise program (to lose weight most especially) can make very good use of this technology to track their calorie level, heart rate etc. This greatly increases their persistence with the activity they engage in (as shown by research that using smartwatches can help motivate persons engaging in one exercise or the other; probably due to the fact that they have real time information on their progress).
Smartwatches despite these many uses and ease it adds to how we live, are not in much use. From social research, this was seen to be due to the fact that smartwatches are generally expensive, and non-aesthetically pleasing and more persons prefer the classic analog feeling of using a watch. A lot of startups are starting to look at Hybrid smartwatches as a better alternative to smartwatches. Karl Kieser of GENY ONE, a Swiss startup, believes smartwatches are not supposed to be expensive or unaesthetically designed. Hybrid smartwatches are looking to integrate classic features like analog time display to the smart features of smartwatches in one-top quality designed chassis.
With Hybrid smartwatches, we are looking at a mix of the analog and digital world, an increase in aesthetics and thus a general increase in the number of persons who use smartwatches as compared to what is obtainable now; this will lead to a larger utilization of the full potential of smartwatches which is certainly more than just telling the time.
Smartwatches can help us improve on our health through tracking of our body vitals, help us engage in better work-out exercises, better sleep tracking and calorie level tracking. This certainly means an improvement on our daily activities, health, and appreciation for technology.