One of the big themes of this year’s CES is going to be the true emergence of wearable computing. Sure, we saw a few smart watches and fitness trackers last year, but it’s expected to explode this year. The first one out of the gate this year is Garmin with a new fitness tracker.
Garmin, a company that’s usually associated with satellite navigation tech, announced that it will be showing its new fitness tracker – vivofit – at CES this year. The small band performs all the functions that you would normally associate with fitness trackers, but it does one have unique trait going for it – custom daily goals. In other words, the vivofit will give you a custom goal every morning and then alert you throughout the day on your progress towards completing said goal.
“Garmin has been providing fitness monitoring devices for over a decade, and with vívofit we say hello to the fitness band that knows your potential,” said Dan Bartel, Garmin vice president of worldwide sales. “Being able to monitor the quality of rest after retiring for the night, being challenged by personalized daily goals and doing so without having to charge it every few days, makes vívofit a fitness band that should be on everyone’s wrist.”
So, how will vivofit make you get up and move? Garmin says that the band knows when you’re sitting and will build up a small red bar on the device’s display after one hour of sitting. In theory, this will remind you to get up, stretch those legs and take a short walk every hour. If you don’t, the red bar will continue to grow longer until you get up and move to reset it.
When you’re done with the day, you can even connect the vivofit to Garmin’s online fitness community called Garmin Connect. This will help you see a larger snapshot of your progress and see how you compare to other users on the site. It can even track your sleep patterns and let you know if you have periods of tumultuous sleep.
The vivofit will be available in Q1 2014 in two varieties – the regular band and one that comes equipped with a heart rate monitor. The regular vivofit will retail for $129 while the heart rate monitor vivofit will retail for $169.
Image via Garmin/Business Wire