While the company is known for its Bluetooth earpieces, Jawbone announced today that it will sell Up to help people keep fit.
Jawbone’s Up is a wristband, iPhone app, and Web app that is designed to collect your activities during the day and at night. The fitness device saves your info, so it can analyze the data to help you understand your habits. For instance, if you use Up, you can learn how a new workout routine is influencing your quality of sleep.
The product is $99. It will be sold at AT&T, Apple, Best Buy, and Target beginning November 6 and will roll out internationally November 17. Jawbone’s Up works on any Apple iOS device including iPhones and iPads.
I know, you’re probably thinking not another health device.
I’m thinking the same thing. With 9,000 health apps in Apple’s iOS App Store–with such titles as RunKeeper for runners, Strava for cyclists, and Gain Fitness for weight lifters–the health app market is getting crowded. I found health apps to be a dime a dozen when I visited Health 2.0 conference recently.
Other companies in the fitness devices space include Zeo, which sells a headband that a person wears during sleep. There’s also a vibrating alarm clock called Lark that keeps track of your sleep patterns. There’s “The Eatery” app from start-up Massive Health that lets users snap photos of food.
Basis recently came out with a hip new watch measures your pulse, calories you burn, and how much you’ve been sweating. Other startups like Fitbit have fancy pedometers that to help people walk 10,000 steps a day. Fitbit also can track more activities like climbing stairs, making it useful throughout the day to track overall fitness activity.
Jawbone Up has a good chance of making a splash into the market because it is a sleep, calorie tracker, and exercise mate rolled into one. Also, its design makes it a fashion statement, rather than being a device you’d have to remember to carry around with you.
Sumon Sadhu, the intelligence director at Quid, previously told me: “One can imagine a scenario where health insurance companies actually start to offer lower premiums just for consumers to use these technologies to monitor their health outcome.”
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