Just when you thought there wasn’t an activity tracker for you comes along the Withings Activité, a retro looking analog watch that hardly advertises its fitness tracking to passers-by at all. Via Wired:
The Activité is a watch—and a handsome one at that. But its dials appear analog, not digital, and it was made in Switzerland. Unlike a traditional luxury timepiece, the display masks an accelerometer instead of cogs, to track the wearer’s steps taken and hours slept. Settings provided by the user help calculate calories burned, and all of that data is streamed back to the Withings Health Mate app. The only giveaway that the Activité can do more than the average watch is a smaller, secondary dial: over the course of a day, a hand ticks from 0 to 100, showing your progress. How that progress gets defined (Did you walk at least four miles? Burn off 1,000 calories?) is up to the user, and controlled through the accompanying app.
“Our mission is to have an impact on health,” Julien De Preaumont, CMO at Withings, tells WIRED. “That requires devices that we’ll use in the long term.” The Activité is so pared down, the design borders on obvious: “Let’s use the design of a classic watch that we know people like,” De Preaumont says. Besides the sapphire glass screen and leather strap, De Preaumont says that users will have the luxury of not needing to charge their gadgets all the time. The Activité stays charged up to a year, because it’s powered with standard, long-lasting watch batteries. “It wasn’t convenient enough,” he says. “The technology has been too confident thinking that you could rely on people, so we are taking a much humbler approach.”
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!