Pebble hoping to make a mark with health and fitness apps

Ahead of releasing their highly-Kickstarted, health-oriented smartwatches, Pebble is looking to get a head start on its ecosystem of health and fitness apps.

The wearables company partnered with Stanford’s Mobilize Lab late last year to work on sleep- and step-tracking algorithms, and is now announcing that it will be making its health algorithms open to the public.

Pebble hopes that this transparency and good will can work to encourage more partners to develop on the company’s smartwatch platform. To push off this initiative, it is starting a research blog and releasing a new app called the Happiness App.

The Happiness app is pretty self-explanatory—it’s meant to measure your mood and how happy you are throughout the day, to try to raise your quality of life. It’s a one-week program that prompts users to input their mood and energy level every hour.

Read also: Nigeria hopes to send Africa’s first astronaut to space by 2030

Susan Holcomb, Pebble’s head of data, says the software has unearthed some interesting and unexpected results throughout the testing process—for instance; you can begin to map someone’s personality by how they feel throughout the day.

“These mood plots end up visualizing people’s personalities. You can see volatility and stability, and you can see who’s a morning person and who’s not,” Holcomb said. She compared her graph with a coworker’s and realized that she’s “all over the place” over the course of the day, while her coworker is more even-keeled.

The app is meant to be an insight into yourself that would be otherwise difficult to achieve. Holcomb’s data said she was happiest after socializing on the phone, so she ended up making more time to do so over the course of the day, which made her more productive. Owners of the Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel, or Pebble Time Round can download the app.

RipplesNigeria …without borders, without fears

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now