Skip to main content

The FitPal promises to be the most comprehensive heart rate wearable yet

Now that the FitBit has lost some of its credibility in the heart rate monitoring game, it looks like the doors have been opened for new competitors to stake their claim in the burgeoning wearables market. Leading the pack in this ongoing race appears to be FitPal, which promises to be “a different kind of wearable.” You won’t find this pal on your wrist, around your neck, or in any of the other predictable locales other devices have favored; rather, the FitPal is a patch that adheres directly to your skin, giving you the potential to unlock the most precise and comprehensive data on the market.

This impressive piece of technology monitors a number of health aspects that are all crucial to your overall well-being. The four main focuses include step count, heart rate, sleep quality, and distance walked — but it’s not enough to simply track raw numbers, the FitPal team notes. Rather, “each heartbeat [should] give an in-depth explanation about what is really going on.” And that’s what the company seeks to do with its wearable.

Recommended Videos

Indeed, alongside the wearable itself is “a complete and comprehensive Fitness, Health and Wellness platform.” Heralded as the most robust 24/7 heart rate wearable, the FitPal measures your heart rate variability, which helps provide the wearer with a clear, quantifiable picture of his or her Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). And because the ANS is “responsible for the health and operation of every organ” in the human body, it “can be used to immediately assess the positive and negative changes happening in the body before any visible symptoms occur.”

As such, the FitPal team asserts, customers can be made “immediately aware of their health trends and risks they might face, see real-time stress levels, their health, fitness and cardio improvements as directly ‘reported’ by their ANS.” And with less than 2 percent error in terms of cardio measurement, this wearable is effectively medical grade.

Designed to integrate seamlessly into your lifestyle, you can wear the FitPal just about anywhere on your torso all day, every day. It will stream real-time data to your smart phone while simultaneously storing important metrics locally. With 13 days left to go on their Kickstarter campaign, the team has already raised nearly 97 percent of its initial $100,000 goal. So if you’re interested in joining a different kind of fitness revolution, you might consider throwing your weight (or your wallet) behind FitPal as an early adopter.

Lulu Chang
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
How does Garmin measure stress, and is it really accurate?
Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

Garmin watches are known for their robust activity tracking, but that's not all these fitness watches can do. Over the years, the company has been adding wellness features to its lineup of watches. These new health-focused metrics allow people to analyze their fitness and identify outside factors affecting their performance. One such factor is stress, which is something Garmin watches actively measures.
But you may be wondering—exactly how does Garmin measure stress? In this article, we break down how Garmin measures stress and delve into the accuracy of this metric. Should you trust your stress score? Read on to find out.

Is Garmin's stress score accurate?

Read more