Jawbone, a company best known for making fashionable Bluetooth earpieces, announced today that it will sell an all-in-one smart fitness gadget that aims to help people totally improve their personal health and fitness.
The $99 device, called Jawbone UP, is a simple-looking wristband capable of collecting data about a person's activity throughout the day as well as sleep patterns at night.
Paired with Jawbone apps on Apple mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads, Jawbone UP also collects and analyzes the data to help you make better sense of your habits and lifestyles, identifying, for example, the effects of exercise on your ability to sleep deeply. While there are some existing personal health and fitness devices that already track and analyze activity and sleep—one example is Fitbit Ultra ($99.95)—Jawbone UP adds intelligent feedback. It can remind you to move more during the day if it notices long periods of motionlessness, or gently vibrate to wake you at the optimal point in your sleep cycle.
Another feature of the Jawbone UP that sets it apart from other smart pedometers and fitness-tracking devices, is it adds a photo journal feature to track what you eat. Other fitness apps that do incorporate diet usually do so by having users manually enter the foods they eat, line by line and ounce by ounce, while estimating the total nutritional and caloric intake. Taking advantage of the cameras built into iPhones and some other iOS devices and encouraging users to actually photograph their food could help the average person better understand what they consume.
Jawbone is releasing the UP in three sizes and seven colors: black, brown, dark red, bright red, white, silver, and bright blue. The device is scheduled to go on sale November 6.