In-Ear Heart Rate

Wearables: A ‘Smart’ Approach for a Better Quality of Life

In-Ear Heart Rate

The holiday season is here - time to indulge in some comfort food and much needed downtime. It’s easy to ease up on our health and fitness goals at this time of the year. Enter wearables to keep people on track – or gear up for some new year’s resolutions.

Today, wearables are widely applied across different fields, including professional sports, where they are used to provide athletes with real-time feedback that can improve their efficiency. By monitoring exercise and health data, including blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing, wearable devices can also warn people when it is necessary to take preventive measures against possible health problems. They can simultaneously remind users to stick to their fitness program, helping to form healthy habits.

Keeping an eye on your heart rate during exercise is the best way to ensure you're getting desirable results. JBL has partnered with Under Armour to launch the Sport Wireless Heart Rate, which features a heartbeat monitoring function. In addition to offering an amazing sound experience, the connected fitness app allows people to view workout data and training analysis in real time, along with customized heart rate feedback to improve performance. With the in-ear heart rate technology and touch sensor, people can optimize their endurance training to reach their workout goals. This converts what would normally have been a boring exercise routine into a spontaneous fun activity.

In addition to smart watches and fitness bracelets, smart clothing options, such as connected shirts, belts with fitness tracking capabilities, shoes that support run tracking, and sports apparel measuring athletic performance, have gradually begun to enter our lives. Google and Levi’s have partnered on the Project Jacquard smart jacket, whose fibers are linked to a detachable smart tag on the cuff, providing connectivity to a paired smartphone. Sportswear companies such as Adidas and Under Armour have previously launched smart running shoes.

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As part of “Global Fitness Week” this year, HARMAN also launched a “10K Walking Challenge” across 6 cities in China. Along with this competition, our employees wore fitness bracelets or smart watches to record their exercise data and transmit it back to an app on their mobile phones or PCs. Wearing such an accessory and keeping track of our daily activity is a great way to visualize incremental improvements, better follow a sensible training regimen, and improve overall quality of life.

Thanks to the fitness challenge and such wearable devices, HARMAN employees in China learned the importance of good health and cultivated better exercise habits. This is also a key reason why the wearable devices market is booming in China, with more people choosing to buy their own wearables, such as smart watches and bracelets, to use as fitness and sports trackers. For the younger generation, these wearables also represent a fashion trend. Ranging from smart watches to body-worn cameras and head-mounted displays, wearables in China are increasingly diversified and differentiated. In 2016, Xiaomi ranked No.1 on the Chinese market, with sales of about 2.8 million products. Other leading brands in the market include Lifesense, which has sold around one million fitness trackers, along with Okii and 360 – both specializing in making smart watches and trackers for kids.

Such amazing wearable technologies are making our lives easier and smarter. Whether you use basic fitness trackers, running watches, heart rate monitors, or smart shoes, by combining these devices with apps on smartphones, improved health, fitness and quality of life has never been easier – whether it’s during the holidays or throughout the year.