Nagging you smartly to fitness
Play
Garmin adds another cool health device - the vivosmart wristband monitor
The vivosmart from Garmin is an activity tracker that’s lets you monitor your smartphone, feeding you notifications while you’re exercising.
It looks like a sleek bracelet, but the cool interface displays your accumulated steps, calories burned and distance walked or run, as well as the time of day.
It vibrates to alert you about calls, SMS messages, Facebook alerts and email coming into your phone.
There are no buttons, just a touch-screen panel with a 1.35x.14-inch OLED display of 128x16 pixels.
It’s compact and light, and the idea is to wear it around the clock to keep track of your activities – or lack of activity, while you’re sleeping. You can wear it in the shower too, since it’s waterproof.
You can get a large or small vivosmart, the former with a 127-172mm band and about 19 grams and the latter 155-221mm and 18.7g.
The first thing you need to do is customise the user settings. For this you have to connect the device to your PC with the provided cable (which also serves as a battery charger). Once connected, specify your birthday, gender, height and weight and normal times to go to bed and wake up.
The sex, age, height and weight data are used in calculating calories burned. The sleep data are for checking whether you sleep soundly.
Next you register for an account with Garmin Connect at Garmin.com. They’ll store your personal data and tracked activities.
Now you can use the Garmin Express program to synchronise what goes on your device with your account.
You can synch the two without a PC using the Garmin Connect Mobile app, which also handles the device settings and your account settings. You need to link your phone to the vivosmart first, via Bluetooth.
Now that everything’s on the same page, you can set your daily goal for roughly how many steps you want to take each day. Or you can use the “auto goal” option, by which the vivosmart gauges your current actively level and assigns you an attainable daily goal.
As you meet each consecutive milestone, the gadget sets the goal a little farther for the next day, gradually nudging you toward a more active lifestyle. Meanwhile you’ll be earning virtual “badges” for your achievements at Garmin Connect.
Garmin points out that prolonged inactivity – like raising a potato farm on the couch – decrease your body’s production of fat-burning enzymes. It cites research indicating that even short walks, if done frequently, reverse that process.
So the vivosmart is there to get you off the couch. Suddenly the “move bar” will light up and the device vibrates to let you know it’s time to get your feet on the ground and your legs swinging. The vibration starts when the half the “move bar” turns opaque white, and then again when the bar is all white.
Having been nagged into motion, it’s easy to use the vivosmart – you just touch and swipe. The otherwise invisible display comes to life at a tap or when a notification arrives. Then you can see your steps and distance racking up and the calories falling away.
Tap once to see the time, displayed as on a watch. Swipe to see the number of steps you’ve made. Swipe again to check your progress toward the goal – how many more steps to go (or by how many steps you’ve already exceeded the goal).
On reaching the goal, though, you will have felt the vivosmart vibrating victoriously and displaying the word “goal”.
Yet another swipe will show the “move bar” so you can see all the inactivity you’ve also racked up. Swipe again for the number of calories lost and the approximate distance covered that day.
If you have your phone with you, the vivosmart offers a control for playing music and adjusting the volume.
I ran a test – or rather walked it – with my Sony Xperia Z3. The vivosmart faithfully alerted me to messages arriving on the phone and email alerts and calls. All the alerts were easy to read on the bracelet, although of course I had to switch to the phone to read email and SMS messages.
My wrist device told me I’d made 11,000 steps, including from the ground to the 31st floor where The Nation newsroom is perched. Weirdly, it also recorded “steps” while I was riding the bus to and from work, evidently picking up the bumps in the road.
I started with the vivosmart’s set goal of 7,000 steps a day but that was soon adjusted to more than 8,400 steps.
You can use the vivosmart along with your MyFitnessPal account. This is a free service for tracking your food intake each day and comparing that with the calories you manage to burn off by exercising.
Also connectable to Garmin’s heart-rate monitor, the vivosmart is available in black, grey, berry, purple or blue for Bt6,590.
KEY SPECS
Display size: 1.35x0.14 inches (34.4x3.5mm)
Display resolution: 128x16 pixels; OLED (illuminated) display
Battery: Rechargeable lithium battery
Battery life: Up to seven days
Water rating: 5 ATM
Band sizes: 127-172mm, 155-221mm
Weight: 19g (large), 18.7g (small)
