Isabel Finn discovers the wristband and app that will change (and monitor) your life
Designed to monitor and help keep control of your life, the UP by Jawbone wristband (available on the AppStore and Google Play) is a guardian angel that has arisen from modern day technology.
With the durability of a watch, the appearance of a bracelet and intelligence of a computer, the UP wristband tracks your fitness, sleeping and eating patterns, and then logs the details onto your phone.
Our favourite feature is the sleep tracker. The ‘miniature Einstein’ records your hours of deep sleep, hours of light sleep, how long it takes you to drift off, the time you are in bed for, your total ‘awake’ time and then the number of times you woke up. A sleep geek’s dream.
Thanks to its attention to detail in tracking your slumber, the band is also capable of waking you up at the optimum time in your sleeping pattern, making those Monday mornings that much easier to cope with.
But of course the band does promise to track your lifestyle, and you would hope that your whole life isn’t spent just sleeping (though occasionally, we wouldn’t mind an extra week in bed). The UP band is therefore so much more than a sleep gadget; it also tracks your activity levels from when you get up to when you go to bed.
The clever technology follows and records your number of steps, distance travelled, active time, total calories burnt, longest time active, longest time idle, calories burnt while active and calories burnt while resting. What more could you possibly want to know?
Food, obviously. A healthy diet is essential for a healthy lifestyle and the UP Jawbone App provides a simple and easy database, including a barcode scanner, of all of the nutritional information for every possible food you could think of. At the end of the day, you will have a summary of how well you have eaten, as well as tips on what you have to eat more of (and unfortunately what you have to eat less of).
Hosain Rahman, CEO of Jawbone, says: "I think it's incredible that we are able to put what is actually a full-blown computer into a form factor like this." We agree; modern technology is brilliant, but this really is the future.
The Jawbone wrist band is £99.99 and available from jawbone.com and the UP by Jawbone app is available for free from iTunes and Google Play.