Spire Wearable Tracks Your Breathing to Lower Your Stress

Running a small business can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to be. There are now wearables that can track your mood as well as your stress levels.

While most fitness trackers will calculate your heart rate, calories, steps as well as sleeping habits, Spire tracks your breathing and stress levels, helping you calm down when necessary.

Spire Wearable Monitors Stress Levels, Provides Tips

Designed by Stanford University’s Calming Technology Lab, the device has almost all the other functions of a regular tracker like counting steps and calories, but it goes a bit further by also monitoring your breathing throughout the day. This allows the device to also tell you when you are stressed or tense and also pinpoints what makes you focused.

The $129.95 device looks like a river stone on one side with a metal clip on the other. This allows you to wear the tracker near our chest of waste. The pebble, which is about a half-inch thick and an inch in diameter should rest on your skin or the waistband of your underwear.

Clipping Spire to your clothes doesn’t do much on its own. The data only syncs up when you open the Spire app on your iPhone. After setting initial goals for Activity, Calm and Focus, the home screen visualizes your breathing pattern with a floating line that goes up when you exhale and down when you inhale. The screen also logs various “streaks.” 21 breaths per minute (BPM) might indicate that you’re tense while 17 BPM is considered calm, slower than average. Focus streaks indicate a more consistent, but still above average breathing pattern.

The app also provides “boosts,” which are basically downloadable info and tips on how you can strengthen and possibly improve those mental health areas that you would like to focus on. Think of it as a yogi and a therapist all in one.

And, unlike some similar gadgets that need charging almost on a daily basis, Spire holds its power for almost a week and it is also hardy and waterproof enough to survive the washing machine in case you forget to take it off your clothes.

If you allow it, Spire can integrate your calendar, data and photos, showing you when and where and maybe even why your breathing patterns changed. And while Spire has built-in motion tracking abilities, it’s the breathing that matters here.

Image: Spire.io

This article, "Spire Wearable Tracks Your Breathing to Lower Your Stress" was first published on Small Business Trends