Faster, further, higher with Garmin

IF YOU’RE WALKING the walk in the name of health, you can also be talking the talk with friends online thanks to the vivosmart HR from Garmin. The fitness wristband keeps you in touch with its quick and easy connection to any smartphone.

Small and lightweight and water-resistant for showers and swimming, the band tracks your heart rate while walking, running or exercising in other ways, counts the floors you climb, the steps you take, the calories you burn and the intensity of your exercise. And, through the night, it’s monitoring the quality of your sleep.

In fact the vivosmart HR has so many useful functions that it won a prize for innovation at the International Consumer Electronics Show in the Fitness, Sport and Biotech category.

The wristband has a built-in rechargeable battery that will last up to five days.

The regular band is 136 to 187mm long and not quite 30 grams in weight and the large is 180 to 223mm and 32 grams. Both are 21mm wide and 12.3mm thick.

The touch-screen display is 1x0.42 inches at a resolution of 160x68 pixels. Here’s where you access the various functions with swipes of the screen, and the data is easy to read even in bright sunlight.

Meanwhile the monitoring data are also delivered to your online account for convenient long-term tracking of your progress. You set up the account with Garmin Connect and download the Garmin Connect app to your phone. The phone can be quickly paired up to the band using the app and a Bluetooth connection. The app will regularly sync with the band and transfer your fitness data to Garmin Connect.

Once your phone knows what’s going on, the vivosmart alerts you to incoming email, missed calls and fresh messages on SMS, Facebook and Line. Check your phone too for weather forecasts – waterproof or not, you don’t want to get caught in a storm while out running. And the wristband is ready to control the music playing on your phone as well.

There’s an Intensity Minutes function that’s quite useful. Any fitness activity lasting at least 10 minutes will be tallied until you’ve done 150 minutes in a given week. That’s the minimum time you should be exercising to stay healthy.

For healthy sleeping, you use the app to input the normal time you go to bed, and that’s when the vivosmart will start monitoring your body movements through the night. It’ll let you know (gently) that you’re tossing and turning too much in your snoozes.

I personally love the floor-climbing monitor, which uses a barometric altimeter to calculate the number of storeys you ascend. The typical goal is 10 floors a day and you’ll get a message every time you manage that.

The number of floors is calculated based on height above the ground. I walked upstairs on a pedestrian flyover, for example, and the wristband “reports” that I’d just scaled two floors. Ascending the stairs to The Nation office on the 31st floor of the Interlink Building brought my daily total to 33 floors.

As a fitness wristband, the main function here is to count your steps. You get little nudges to get moving and stir up the old metabolism. Sit idle for an hour and the band will vibrate and display a “move bar”. And that will happen every 15 minutes until you finally feel guilty enough to stroll around for five minutes or so, which is long enough to clear the move bar from the screen.

I was getting regular reports that I’d done 12,000 to 15,000 steps a day until I added a 10-kilometre morning run as well and was “rewarded” with a pat on the back for boosting that to 20,000 steps.

While exercising, the heart-rate sensor is helpful for avoiding injury by exceeding the recommended maximum for too long. Your heart rate should be 220 minus your age (167 beats per minute in my case).

On my 10km run, hitting top speed, the wristband clocked my heart rate between 150 and 160bpm. In a final sprint I briefly hit 199, and then it quickly dropped to 100 once I’d finished and was walking to cool down. By comparison, on that 31-floor vertical march to the office, my heart rate was 100 to 130bpm.

Garmin’s vivosmart HR is available in Black, Midnight Blue or Imperial Purple for Bt5,990.

 

Key Specs

- Dimensions: Regular band |36-187mm, X Large 180-224mm, width 21mm, thickness 12.3mm

- Display size: 1x0.42 inch (25.3x10.7mm)

- Display resolution: 160x68 pixels

- Weight: Regular 29.6g, X Large 32g

- Battery type: Rechargeable, |built-in lithium-ion

- Battery life: Up to five days

- Radio frequency/protocol: 2.4GHz ANT+ wireless communications |protocol, Bluetooth Smart wireless technology

- Water resistance: 50 metres