Fitbit Sense: A Revolutionary Wearable with Unprecedented Sensors

In recent months, Fitbit has been making waves in the wearable technology industry with its latest device, the Fitbit Sense. This new smartwatch is equipped with an array of innovative sensors that set it apart from its competitors. One of the most exciting features of the Fitbit Sense is its readiness score, which provides users with a daily assessment of their overall health and wellness. This score is calculated based on factors such as activity levels, sleep quality, and nutrition, among others. While this feature is not entirely new to wearable technology, it's an interesting twist that allows users to gain insight into their daily behavior.

The readiness score is particularly noteworthy because it builds upon existing Fitbit features. For instance, the Fitbit Sense already has a sleep score that provides users with a sense of how well they slept each night. However, the new readiness score takes this concept to the next level by offering a more comprehensive view of user health and wellness. This could potentially be used to identify areas where users may need improvement, such as getting more physical activity or eating healthier. The idea is to empower users with data-driven insights that can inform their daily decisions.

Another feature of the Fitbit Sense that's generating significant interest is its temperature sensing capabilities. This technology has been present in some Fitbit devices for years but was previously only used internally. Now, Fitbit is unlocking this capability through software updates to use it for skin temperature readings. While this may seem like a minor innovation, it highlights the rapid pace of progress in wearable technology. The ability to track body temperature can be useful in detecting various health conditions and monitoring user comfort levels.

One of the most significant features of the Fitbit Sense is its electrocardiogram (ECG) capabilities. This feature allows users to scan their heart for signs of atrial fibrillation, a serious condition that requires medical attention. The ECG functionality on the Fitbit Sense is not FDA-cleared yet and is pending approval from regulatory bodies. However, this technology has been present in other smartwatches, such as Samsung's Watch Active 2, which also faced significant delays before receiving clearance.

The intersection of these features raises questions about how users will experience them on a daily basis. Fitbit has emphasized the importance of consolidating data and providing actionable insights to users. This approach aims to empower users with information that can help them optimize their health, fitness, and wellness goals. By analyzing user behavior and offering targeted guidance, Fitbit hopes to create a more holistic and personalized experience for its users.

The impending acquisition by Google is another factor that could significantly impact the future of Fitbit and wearable technology as a whole. While details about this acquisition are still under wraps, it's clear that it will have far-reaching implications for the industry. It remains to be seen how Google will integrate Fitbit's sensor capabilities into its own ecosystem or how the brand will evolve in response to the acquisition.

The Google acquisition also raises questions about the long-term viability of certain features and technologies within the Fitbit Sense. Will these sensors remain, or will they be replaced by new ones? How will the overall user experience change as a result of this acquisition? These are unknowns that will likely take some time to resolve.

One thing is clear: wearable technology is rapidly evolving, and devices like the Fitbit Sense are at the forefront of this innovation. The integration of advanced sensors into everyday wearables has the potential to revolutionize how we track our health, fitness, and wellness. As we move forward, it will be exciting to see how these technologies intersect and inform one another, ultimately leading to a more personalized and effective approach to health monitoring.

For now, the Fitbit Sense offers an intriguing glimpse into the future of wearable technology. With its array of sensors, emphasis on data-driven insights, and incorporation of cutting-edge features like temperature sensing and ECG capabilities, this device is poised to set new standards for the industry. As users begin to experience these innovations firsthand, it will be fascinating to see how they choose to utilize them in their daily lives.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe fitbit sense is a totally new sensor-studded fitness watch temperature stress sensing and ecg i've got it on my wrist i just haven't been able to set it up with fitbit's app yet that's because it's strange times normally i'd be in an event looking at a demo instead fitbit sent me the watch but they haven't connected me yet with the fitbit app that would allow me to use this still i got to talk to fitbit about the sensors and there is a lot to talk about the fitbit sense is fitbit's newest top-end smartwatch going alongside the fitbit versa 3 and its various other trackers the sensors on here add to what fitbit already had adding temperature sensing to check your skin temperature on your wrist eda which is electrodermal activity that looks at your galvanic skin response to check how stressed you are and it adds ecg which is to look at heart atrial fibrillation much like the apple watch and a lot of other fitness watches out there samsung's recent watches have it too now fitbit tries to blend all these together with also a few improvements on some of the other sensortech the heart rate optical setup here now has multiple optical channels which fitbit says will give a more accurate heart rate on more people's wrists that's interesting because not only should it provide less flaking out but it could provide a richer flow of heart rate data why that's interesting i'll get into that in a second but the design of the watch feels a lot like a fitbit versa i mean it basically is an enhanced nicer fitbit versa but the feel of it is sleeker there's more metal and glass it feels really sharply designed i can already feel that comparing it to the fitbit versa 2 which i've been wearing for a while the buttons have changed there really is no button at all it's a haptic depression here that you can feel it doesn't click you can press and get a little vibration that's like what you have on the fitbit charge three and four so it's come over here as well but no buttons at all the way the straps attach is much better the fitbit versa 2 got really weird and it was hard to get those straps hooked in these have a much easier release mechanism here that you can click and you can just pull it right out and it pops out and then you can put it right back on super simple the feel of the charger is also a lot nicer fitbit has a million different chargers and there's a new one for this but this one just snaps on and that's it it's a lot better than that weird alligator clip thing that was on the fitbit versa models so what does all this stuff mean all of these sensors going on at the same time i mean some of them i've seen before the idea of trying to sense your stress level through galvanic skin response has been around and fitbit is going to be using it in a breakout app that's going to get your stress level when you put your palm right over this to get the electrical conductivity this whole thing here is metal and not only does the eda stuff but will do ecg when you put your fingers on the edges to complete the circuit temperature is the sort of thing that we have not seen in a lot of other wearables but it's super interesting i've been wearing an uraring for the last few months this ring has temperature and is a sign of where a lot of other wearables i think are going to go it can't tell your actual you know 98.6 skin temperature but it will tell a relative temperature on your finger same thing with fitbit sense and you'll get a graph of that or has been researching for a while how temperature could be a forecast for potential signs of covid that's something down the road that could be interesting right now fitbit is taking temperature and all these other variables and bringing it together into a kind of daily stress score that you're going to get in the morning similar to what ura already has in a readiness score that score is new for fitbit maybe it's like the daytime version of your sleep score so you wake up and kind of get a little bit of a sense of where you're at for the day maybe it helps you get a sense of you know if you're not feeling so well maybe it's noticing that i'm curious to check that out now the weirdest thing is that while this has temperature sensing this actually isn't the only fitbit that's going to have temperature sensing it turns out that fitbit versa devices for the past few years have had some sort of temperature sensing baked in that was meant for the internal system and now they're unlocking that through software to use that to help sense your skin temperature as well that's pretty insane the third part ecg is pretty familiar already you know any watch that has ecg already like the apple watch is using a one lead ecg and electrocardiogram to complete a circuit to scan your heart for 30 seconds to see if you've got any signs of atrial fibrillation now that's serious and then you go to a doctor you go to a cardiologist and it's not a replacement for for a deeper ecg that you can get at a cardiologist for instance these types of ecg's won't look for signs of a heart attack now fitbit is not fda cleared yet for the fitbit sense it's pending that's also not new in wearables samsung's watch active 2 took a long time to get fda clearance for ecg and a lot of devices are seeing holdups that i've seen in that landscape so you know hopefully that's going to hit in the fall but we just don't know when and it means that at launch you may not be able to use the ecg feature again how do these all intersect fitbit's throwing a lot of sensors here and one thing we haven't even gotten into is the google acquisition that's pending but i did talk with fitbit's heads of research to talk about what they see on these sensors and what they could possibly mean to date our focus has been on trying to increase the the accuracy of the heart rate and we're quite proud in the improvement that we're getting there one can envision that there'd be more information associated with this um they could help with other types of sensing opportunities right now in the in the app what's called eda scanner we're going to count up the number of spikes that we see every 30 seconds and report that back to you as a user so you can get a very a very approximate measure of the overall state of engagement of your of your body just by taking a sort of snapshot in time of the number of these responses so we continue to add more and more of these things where i think you wouldn't necessarily you know if you were just the average person you might think that's not what my wearables should do but i think we we take a view that more information is better for you we want to give you and empower you as much information as you can so you can choose to do what you want with your health i think that is an ongoing thing you know as we add more hardware sensors as we add more features we're always trying to think about how we can consolidate these things and give people actions and guidance to improve their stress levels increase their activity and make their activity more efficient towards their heart health etc give them general awareness of conditions that they might be unknowingly susceptible towards so there's a lot to take in and fitbit's ideas of where these sensors could be applied for research show potentially a long road ahead that doesn't mean you're going to be seeing all that right now on your wrist they're going to be a couple of key parts but not necessarily all that deeper stuff now we also don't know anything about the impending google acquisition and how that will impact fitbit will these be the last fitbit devices that we see will they be folded into a new generation of google ones and how will google's ecosystem work with fitbits and fitbit premium these are unknowns that fitbit did not answer but i do know that these types of sensors open up new doors that aren't on a lot of other smart watches and i think that new sensor tech is going to be showing up on a lot more wearables soon what we don't know yet is how all these sensors combine on an everyday wrist experience but we will soon when we get set up to actually use this thing i'm super curious and i'll share my thoughts as soon as i can i feel like all these things are fascinating for where health tech is going maybe you feel the same way there's gonna be a lot of changes in wearable tech over the next few years and fitbit sense seems like the beginning of it youthe fitbit sense is a totally new sensor-studded fitness watch temperature stress sensing and ecg i've got it on my wrist i just haven't been able to set it up with fitbit's app yet that's because it's strange times normally i'd be in an event looking at a demo instead fitbit sent me the watch but they haven't connected me yet with the fitbit app that would allow me to use this still i got to talk to fitbit about the sensors and there is a lot to talk about the fitbit sense is fitbit's newest top-end smartwatch going alongside the fitbit versa 3 and its various other trackers the sensors on here add to what fitbit already had adding temperature sensing to check your skin temperature on your wrist eda which is electrodermal activity that looks at your galvanic skin response to check how stressed you are and it adds ecg which is to look at heart atrial fibrillation much like the apple watch and a lot of other fitness watches out there samsung's recent watches have it too now fitbit tries to blend all these together with also a few improvements on some of the other sensortech the heart rate optical setup here now has multiple optical channels which fitbit says will give a more accurate heart rate on more people's wrists that's interesting because not only should it provide less flaking out but it could provide a richer flow of heart rate data why that's interesting i'll get into that in a second but the design of the watch feels a lot like a fitbit versa i mean it basically is an enhanced nicer fitbit versa but the feel of it is sleeker there's more metal and glass it feels really sharply designed i can already feel that comparing it to the fitbit versa 2 which i've been wearing for a while the buttons have changed there really is no button at all it's a haptic depression here that you can feel it doesn't click you can press and get a little vibration that's like what you have on the fitbit charge three and four so it's come over here as well but no buttons at all the way the straps attach is much better the fitbit versa 2 got really weird and it was hard to get those straps hooked in these have a much easier release mechanism here that you can click and you can just pull it right out and it pops out and then you can put it right back on super simple the feel of the charger is also a lot nicer fitbit has a million different chargers and there's a new one for this but this one just snaps on and that's it it's a lot better than that weird alligator clip thing that was on the fitbit versa models so what does all this stuff mean all of these sensors going on at the same time i mean some of them i've seen before the idea of trying to sense your stress level through galvanic skin response has been around and fitbit is going to be using it in a breakout app that's going to get your stress level when you put your palm right over this to get the electrical conductivity this whole thing here is metal and not only does the eda stuff but will do ecg when you put your fingers on the edges to complete the circuit temperature is the sort of thing that we have not seen in a lot of other wearables but it's super interesting i've been wearing an uraring for the last few months this ring has temperature and is a sign of where a lot of other wearables i think are going to go it can't tell your actual you know 98.6 skin temperature but it will tell a relative temperature on your finger same thing with fitbit sense and you'll get a graph of that or has been researching for a while how temperature could be a forecast for potential signs of covid that's something down the road that could be interesting right now fitbit is taking temperature and all these other variables and bringing it together into a kind of daily stress score that you're going to get in the morning similar to what ura already has in a readiness score that score is new for fitbit maybe it's like the daytime version of your sleep score so you wake up and kind of get a little bit of a sense of where you're at for the day maybe it helps you get a sense of you know if you're not feeling so well maybe it's noticing that i'm curious to check that out now the weirdest thing is that while this has temperature sensing this actually isn't the only fitbit that's going to have temperature sensing it turns out that fitbit versa devices for the past few years have had some sort of temperature sensing baked in that was meant for the internal system and now they're unlocking that through software to use that to help sense your skin temperature as well that's pretty insane the third part ecg is pretty familiar already you know any watch that has ecg already like the apple watch is using a one lead ecg and electrocardiogram to complete a circuit to scan your heart for 30 seconds to see if you've got any signs of atrial fibrillation now that's serious and then you go to a doctor you go to a cardiologist and it's not a replacement for for a deeper ecg that you can get at a cardiologist for instance these types of ecg's won't look for signs of a heart attack now fitbit is not fda cleared yet for the fitbit sense it's pending that's also not new in wearables samsung's watch active 2 took a long time to get fda clearance for ecg and a lot of devices are seeing holdups that i've seen in that landscape so you know hopefully that's going to hit in the fall but we just don't know when and it means that at launch you may not be able to use the ecg feature again how do these all intersect fitbit's throwing a lot of sensors here and one thing we haven't even gotten into is the google acquisition that's pending but i did talk with fitbit's heads of research to talk about what they see on these sensors and what they could possibly mean to date our focus has been on trying to increase the the accuracy of the heart rate and we're quite proud in the improvement that we're getting there one can envision that there'd be more information associated with this um they could help with other types of sensing opportunities right now in the in the app what's called eda scanner we're going to count up the number of spikes that we see every 30 seconds and report that back to you as a user so you can get a very a very approximate measure of the overall state of engagement of your of your body just by taking a sort of snapshot in time of the number of these responses so we continue to add more and more of these things where i think you wouldn't necessarily you know if you were just the average person you might think that's not what my wearables should do but i think we we take a view that more information is better for you we want to give you and empower you as much information as you can so you can choose to do what you want with your health i think that is an ongoing thing you know as we add more hardware sensors as we add more features we're always trying to think about how we can consolidate these things and give people actions and guidance to improve their stress levels increase their activity and make their activity more efficient towards their heart health etc give them general awareness of conditions that they might be unknowingly susceptible towards so there's a lot to take in and fitbit's ideas of where these sensors could be applied for research show potentially a long road ahead that doesn't mean you're going to be seeing all that right now on your wrist they're going to be a couple of key parts but not necessarily all that deeper stuff now we also don't know anything about the impending google acquisition and how that will impact fitbit will these be the last fitbit devices that we see will they be folded into a new generation of google ones and how will google's ecosystem work with fitbits and fitbit premium these are unknowns that fitbit did not answer but i do know that these types of sensors open up new doors that aren't on a lot of other smart watches and i think that new sensor tech is going to be showing up on a lot more wearables soon what we don't know yet is how all these sensors combine on an everyday wrist experience but we will soon when we get set up to actually use this thing i'm super curious and i'll share my thoughts as soon as i can i feel like all these things are fascinating for where health tech is going maybe you feel the same way there's gonna be a lot of changes in wearable tech over the next few years and fitbit sense seems like the beginning of it you\n"