UP

I just spent $99 on a bracelet, for myself! File that under phrases I never thought I would say. It wasn't offered by a guy opening a long trench-coat as a "deal". I wasn't suffering from insomnia where the home shopping network suckered me. I honestly intended to purchase it. Don't you think it looks good on me? Okay, since when would I buy anything for fashion, if you guessed there's an ulterior motive, then you are correct. This bracelet is actually a tech gadget and those are hard for me to pass UP.

What exactly does Jawbone's UP do? It basically tracks everything you do, scary huh, from a fitness point of view. During the day, it collects how many steps you've taken. At night, it tracks how well you sleep. It also pays attention to what you eat, but you do have to manually tell it what food you are eating. Kind of a cool gadget to get an idea of what a typical day looks like.

As somebody who tracks every run I do, the fitness side of UP isn't a huge advantage. Between my phone and my Garmin watch, I know how many running miles I log each week. Though, only having UP for a few days now, it's amazing how little movement I do in a day without running. I knew I wasn't super active at a desk job, but wow, looking at the data it's almost depressing. No wonder America is getting fatter and lazier.

My main curiosity with UP is the ability to track sleep patterns. Here's a sample:



The dark blue bars are deep sleep, the light blue are light sleep, and the orange parts are me still awake or getting up. As to how accurate this data is, I really have no idea, but the fact that it can obviously tell when I get up without triggering it, tells me it's at least doing something. I think over time it will be interesting to see how sleep patterns look staying at a hotel, falling asleep on the couch, after a long day, etc.

I haven't had it long enough to really put UP through it's paces yet. This past week, I was doing something special with one of my running programs, so I haven't specifically used the workout tracking feature of the device. The meal tracking option seems the least useful feature. At the moment, you take pictures of the food you eat with your phone, then a few hours later UP asks you how you feel. Not extremely helpful in my opinion. Jawbone really needs to either integrate with another service or build there own to build a food database with nutrition information. Being able to see a rough estimate of steps and calories burned versus calorie intake, now that is bordering on useful information. My biggest complaint so far is all the information resides in the phone app. Currently it only works with the iPhone, which I'm sure will change, but why they didn't develop a web site to view progress and the information the device collects is a big failure. Hopefully, that will change down the road, but it really limits usability in my opinion.

Even though there's certain improvements Jawbone can make, it's still a fun little toy that I intend to play with for awhile. It's probably a good thing that I don't have my cats anymore, I'd be so tempted to track their sleep patterns! Since I can't do that, I guess I have to continue to experiment on myself....time for a nap! Hey, after all, it's science.