There’s a new Fitbit in town. The original fitness tracker brand has released three new products, including a smart watch that monitors your heart health, skin temperature and how your body handles stress. With stress levels off the charts in 2020, it’s undoubtedly a handy feature.
The Fitbit Sense retails for $499 and is loaded with features including an EDA Scan App that detects electrodermal activity, which can indicate your body’s response to stress. According to CNET, the app takes a reading over time to sense your overall stress.
“Your body’s sympathetic nervous system is sending little signals to your sweat glands all the time,” Fitbit’s lead research scientist Conor Heneghan told CNET. “That creates a tiny bit of extra moisture to your skin, and that changes the conductivity of your skin.”
To use this feature, you simply “put your hand over the device, and basically it is a very, very small microcurrent that’s going through the palm of your hand,” Heneghan said.
“And we can pick up the individual spikes of nerve sympathetic nervous system activity. In the EDA scan app, we’re going to count up the number of spikes we see every 30 seconds and report that back to you.”
The Fitbit Sense also has an ECG App, which monitors your heart atrial fibrillation and will alert you should your heart rate be unusually slow or fast. The addition of a skin temperature sensor monitors your temperature changes on a daily basis and will alert you if it varies from your baseline temperature.
“The origin of this was pre-pandemic,” Fitbit’s head of research, Shelten Yuen told CNET. “A while ago, we had this hypothesis that with a wearable device, the temperature sensor could be used to detect a fever and even predict a fever was going to occur.”
Other features include menstrual health tracking, a sleep tracker and Smart Wake — an alarm that wakes you with a quiet vibration during a lighter sleep stage so you wake up feeling more refreshed.
The Fitbit Versa 3 is slightly cheaper at $399 and allows you to track your sleep, heart rate and workouts. It also supports both Alexa and Google Assistant and has the ability to play music from Pandora and Spotify.
The final new launch is the Fitbit Inspire 2, which retails for $179.95. This is an entry-level fitness tracker that has an updated look and a few new features including Active Minutes, which helps you make the most of your workouts by buzzing when you’ve entered your personalised target heart rate zone.
All three products launch today via the Fitbit website.