Pretty much everyone is jumping on the wearable bandwagon these days; CES was full of smartwatches and fitness trackers a-plenty. Epson isn’t perhaps the most obvious company to make a smartwatch – the firm is best known for its printers – but if you take a closer look it makes a lot of sense. Epson has spent a lot of time researching and developing sensors for various tasks, and sensors form the bulk of what makes wearable computers useful. One of the sensors that Epson has developed is quite unique in the smartwatch market, and it’s this that makes their line of wearables so interesting.
This unique sensor is a heart rate monitor – and it’s really cool. It reads your heart rate through your skin by sensing the amount of light reflected by red blood cells. Heart rate tracking has been possible before using a chest strap, but Epson’s system works right inside a watch or wristband. This system – which Epson is calling Pulsense – can also track how many calories you’re burning, given some basic information like your age and gender, or how well you sleep. It’s pretty incredible stuff, and according to Epson the system is hyper-accurate. When combined with accelerometer-based data like steps taken and floors climbed, you get a much more accurate picture of your overall activity – the quantified self taken to the next level.
Epson have incorporated these sensors into two products for now – the Pulsense Band and Pulsense Watch. Both incorporate the same level of tracking, but offer different levels of feedback. The Band has a simple LED indicator for activity levels, like the Nike Fuelband, while the Watch has a full-blown LED display that can display stats like your heart-rate and calories burned, as well as more basic stuff like the time.
The Epson wearables are also pretty impressive from a longevity standpoint – they have sufficient memory to store about 480 hours worth of data before they need syncing to a computer or mobile phone, and battery life should be quite long – on the order of weeks – thanks to the simple display and efficient 3-in-1 processor.
Both Band and Watch will debut this summer. UK prices haven’t yet been determined, but US prices have been set at $129 for the Band and $179 for the Watch. You can register interest for both via the links below – and then you’ll be alerted once we have a price and expected arrival date for the pair.
What do you make of the announcements? Let us know in the comments below!