Are the stresses of life a little too much to handle at times? Maybe you should work on your breathing. At least, that’s what the creators of the Spire Activity Tracker believe. According to them, when stress triggers our brain’s ‘fight or flight’ response, we experience shallow breathing, an elevated heart rate, and muscle tension. By that same logic, improving the way we breathe should theoretically help us to calm down; the lungs and the brain are inextricably connected, after all.
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To that end, they’ve created what they refer to as the world’s first ‘state of mind’ tracker. This little stone-shaped gadget clips onto a bra strap, belt, underwear strap, or collar- basically, anywhere close to the body. At that point, it tracks the number of steps you take and monitors your breathing pattern, analyzing your stress levels based on the data it collects. By doing this, it’s able to detect when you’re calm, focused, tense, or completely out of your mind with stress. This information is all sent to your smartphone via a Bluetooth connection, which the device also uses to send notifications based on personal wellness and exercise – for example, if you’re stressed out, it can urge you to take a deep breath.
The team’s currently working on developing features that will allow the Spire Activity Tracker to monitor how you breathe during sleep, offering suggestions on how you might go about getting a more complete night’s rest.
Now, there’s one spot of bad news regarding Spire, I’m afraid: although the team is currently working on an Android app, Spire for the time being is iOS-only. So…basically, unless you have an iPod, iPad, or iPhone, you probably aren’t going to get much use out of this nifty little device. If you’re an Apple user, you’re good to go with the Spire Activity Tracker right away.
Anyway, those of you interested in picking up one of these gadgets for yourself can visit the product’s official website, where it’s available for pre-order for $119 (it’ll retail for $149). There are limited models available, so you’d best be quick about it.
Spire Breath Tracker | Gallery
