Longevity Briefs: A New Health Focused Wristband That Monitors Your Physical and Psychological Health

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Longevity briefs provides a short summary of novel piece of research, medicine, or technology that caught the attention of our researchers in Oxford, due to its potential to improve our health, wellbeing, and longevity.

Why is this important: These days health focused watches and wristbands are becoming ubiquitous. Apple has its wildly popular Apple Watch that continuously monitors your heart rate and heart rhythms. It also tracks your physical activity, monitors your sleep, your stress, it notifies you about loud environments, and it detects if you have had a fall and appropriately alerts emergency services.

Samsung’s latest Galaxy Watch 3 can do all the things that an Apple watch can do, plus it can continuously monitor your blood pressure, and blood oxygen levels. There are many other companies such as FitBit, Garmin, and others that are trying to help you improve your physical health by continuous tracking, but no company has yet tried to measure your psychological well being.

What did they do: Amazon recently announced a wristband, named Halo, that not only monitors your fitness by tracking your heart-rate, physical activity, and body composition (using AI-image analysis), but they are also trying to improve your psychological wellbeing by measuring the tone of your voice throughout the day. The Halo band is currently priced at $65, and is available for pre-order in the US.

Key takeaway(s): Amazon Halo, the physical and psychological fitness focused wristband, has built-in microphones that collect samples of your voice and conversations throughout the day. This voice data is analyzed by a Voice AI that provides you with a feedback regarding your emotional well-being. Of course, you can turn off the microphone anytime you like.

The AI can also assist you to improve the quality of your conversations by prompting you to improve your voice for positivity, energy, and attentiveness. Overall, this type of AI-assisted psychological could help you improve your emotional well-being.