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Smartwatches/Bands

The Sowatch so wants to be your life coach

Big names like FitBit and Jawbone have long offered people the possibility of tracking their level of activity and have become pretty successful at doing so. But while they offer most people a lot of options, people can always go for more. The Sowatch is trying to give it to them.

The Sowatch is a dedicated, fitness-oriented smartwatch similarly equipped with the connectivity and sensors one would expect from a product like this. The difference is how closely it works with its dedicated smartphone app to serve as much more than an activity tracker.

The device wears many hats, claiming to allow users to do everything from set fitness goals, track progress or just monitor the daily step count to design custom workouts and send highly detailed medical information  — parameters as granular blood pressure, heart activity, hypoxia, etc. — to family or a physician should they pass a pre-set trigger. This makes it the perfect tool to prevent injury and overtraining during activity or manage diabetes using its blood sugar tracker, for instance.

Leaderboards add a competitive social element to the wearable, while its ten-day battery life lets users forget about it charging it for long stretches of time. Each Sowatch goes for $119 and is slated to ship in March 2017. Its Indiegogo campaign is looking for $100,000 by November 2016 to see success.

The Sowatch is a truly promising piece of technology if it really can do everything advertised. All its many talents make it very hard to believe it can accurately and competently execute on each. Some of the most successful wearables on the market do just half of what the Sowatch can accomplish — and not even that well. In the end, the technology for a truly accurate wearable offering what everything the Sowatch does is still way off. In the meantime, another more dedicated fitness or sleep tracker will probably be more useful due to its specificity.

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