Wearable

During an interview with Wired, Cook highlighted the Apple Watch’s AFib and sleep apnea detection, while also hinting at the possibility of using AI to alert users to serious illnesses:

I’m not going to announce anything today. But we have research going on. We’re pouring all of ourselves in here, and we work on things that are years in the making. We were working on hearing a long time before we got it dialed in to where we felt comfortable shipping it.

An unreleased version of the Pixel Watch face with a ring of complications appeared in a Black Friday promo post on the Made by Google YouTube account that 9to5Google spotted.

The outlet saw the same watch face in a video about the Pixel Watch 3’s design that Google published last month that has since been made private.

Ahead of Pac-Man’s 45th anniversary next year, Casio is launching a collection of four retro digital watches featuring the yellow dot chaser. The standouts include a yellow calculator watch with an inverted screen and a model that’s expected to have Bluetooth connectivity and step tracking. Pricing isn’t known, but availability is expected in December — at least in Japan.

Through a new listing on the company’s US site, Casio has revealed that its 50th anniversary ring watch isn’t going to be exclusive to Japan. You can’t preorder it yet, but the site says the finger-worn watch, which has functions like a stopwatch and flashing alarms, is expected to be available in the US in December for $120.

The two companies announced a “strategic partnership” today where Oura Ring and Dexcom CGM users can more easily share their health data between the two platforms. Both companies will also sell and cross promote each other’s products.

Oura’s been diving into metabolic health lately, acquiring a CGM startup called Veri just a few months ago.

To top it all off: Dexcom is also investing $75 million in Oura.

Owners of the smart glasses in France, Italy, Ireland, and Spain will get Meta AI features starting today, the company announced.

For now, Meta AI can answer general questions, but it won’t get multimodal features like using the Ray-Bans’ camera to tell you about things you see — the company has called the EU regulatory environment too “unpredictable” to do that right now.

If you thought step counting and activity tracking was a new-ish thing, apparently not! This excerpt from Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media goes into how wealthy people in the 1800s used pedometers as a form of surveillance — tracking naughty spouses, and checking to see if soldiers were properly patrolling... or just taking a nap during the night shift.

Although Casio’s first wearable calculators debuted in 1980, its new lineup of calculator watches pay tribute to even older hardware. They’re styled after the Casio Mini, the company’s first personal calculator from 1972, and feature inverted LCD displays plus five years of battery life. They’re available now for $35.95 each in black, ivory, or blue green colorways.

Google just announced several new family-oriented features for its kids’ tracker. Chief among them, families can now have group chats in the Ace app, and siblings can annoy — er, constructively chat with — each other via text or calls on the wrist. There are also new Family Quests and a new game called Solar Sword.

November’s Pixel Watch update is here to address last month’s botched Wear OS 5 rollout for older devices, but the curious thing is the update note says the next one is months away:

Pixel Watch 1, Pixel Watch 2, and Pixel Watch 3 devices will receive the November 2024 software update, with the next update planned for March 2025.

It’s odd since Google generally pushes out an update every month. There’s also simply no reason given. Well, a lot can happen in four months.

Unsurprising. Oura also found that there was a 2.3 percent increase in stressed minutes, a 19.5 percent decrease in restorative time and heart rates were 3.7 percent higher.

My own Oura data shows that I had 4 hours 30 minutes of stress on election day and eight whole hours of stress processing the results yesterday.