Spire wants to make fitness wearables even easier by designing them to be truly wearable. The company is announcing the Spire Health Tag, which is small enough to stick to your clothing and serve as a personal health monitor.
It can track your heart rate, breathing, activity, sleep patterns, and your moment-to-moment stress level. The tags relay that data to your smartphone, which can offer you real-time advice, such as telling you to take a deep breath when your stress peaks. And it does so without subjecting you to clunky wristbands or restrictive chest straps.
The tags stay invisible, inside your clothes, and no charging is required, as the battery lasts a year and a half. It's OK to put the tags through the washer and dryer. The technology was designed around the idea that wearables should disappear into the fabric.
The wearables are disposable and get around the problem of daily maintenance chores, like charging or collecting data with no actionable insights. Consumers have begun to perceive wearables as gimmicks and are abandoning them in junk drawers by the millions, Spire said.
About a 1,000 health care professionals recommend that people use the company's existing product, the Spire Stone, a wearable breath tracker that helps you stay calm. Over the past couple of years, the Spire Stone has generated more than $8 million in sales, and a study by Stanford University at the Anxiety and Depression Association of America showed that 37 percent of people who used it were able to remain calmer.
Spire has now repackaged some of that technology in a much smaller device.
“This is the product that we started the company to make,” said Jonathan Palley, cofounder and CEO of Spire, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We wanted the technology to become invisible and get out of your way.”
You can stick the tag on the inside of your clothes so that it has contact with your skin and then forget it. It's available in packs of three, eight, or 15, and it adheres to the clothes you wear the most, such as bras, underwear, pajamas, and exercise gear.
In addition to measuring health metrics like activity, sleep, heart rate, and heart rate variability, Spire Health Tags have proprietary respiratory sensors that measure your breathing, giving it the ability to help you understand and manage stress. In addition, they have a heart rate sensor and a motion sensor. Palley said that the device is very power-efficient because the proprietary respiratory sensor is extremely energy-efficient and is able to capture a lot of data. The device conserves energy by only updating your smartphone when an event is triggered.
You can get personalized guidance through the app by selecting from tailored programs that give you the insights you care about. You can focus on programs like "sleep better," "stay active," "reduce tension," and others.
Spire will say things via the app, such as, “It took you 26 percent longer than usual to fall asleep last night. Got time for a quick breathing exercise before bed tonight?”
Or it will say, “Today you were 22 percent less active than usual -- and 42 percent more tense than usual. What can you do to turn this around?”
A pack of three starts at $100; an eight-pack sells for $200; and a 15-pack sells for $300.
Palley, Neema Moraveji, and Ben Yule started Spire in 2013. The company has raised $10 million and has 25 employees.