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Wearables
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Apple’s new and proposed health and wellness apps to entice new customers include an AI-driven health coach that will create personalised plans to motivate users to stay fit, and a mood-tracking feature.

There is growing speculation about Apple committing to develop VR or AR goggles, but after Meta’s false start in the metaverse and Google dropping Google Glass, experts wonder if the timing is right.

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Unlike the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch, the Watch D by Huawei uses a built-in inflatable strap to measure blood pressure and a health app that can be used across different mobile devices.

The Google smartwatch is elegant and petite, but its round shape will divide opinion – it makes reading and typing text tricky. For sports users the software is fiddly.

It’s taken years, but Apple will launch software this autumn that will allow Apple Watch users to track their sleep cycle stages in a proactive manner. The reason it’s taken so long? Apple wanted to get it right.

Could your clothes tell you when to have a drink or how fast your heart’s beating, as a smartwatch does? Fast fashion’s H&M experiments with smart clothing and AI.

Social media giant and luxury eyewear brand have teamed up to release their own smart glasses, called Ray-Ban Stories – which you can use to take pictures and make calls and videos.

Sports technology that monitors technique and apparel to improve performance helps athletes, but critics say this can equate to ‘technological doping’.

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Apple is looking at including new medical sensors in its Watch, according to one of its suppliers, but the hardware to monitor blood pressure and blood sugar among other things won’t be available until at least 2022.

Companies are beginning to offer wearables in the fight against Covid-19, from bracelets that light up when people stand too close to a wristband that alerts wearers when they may be at risk.

Apple focused on the new Apple Watch Series 6, Watch SE and iPads at its September event instead of the iPhone 12 – one of the 6’s new vaunted features is the ability to track blood-oxygen levels every 15 seconds.

Amazon’s Halo wearable has a Tone feature that it says can tell your emotion by your voice. Artificial intelligence experts doubt an algorithm can decipher complex human emotions.

The Fitbit Sense tracks your heart and breathing rates, reads your skin temperature and senses how much you sweat. It may give early warning of symptoms of infectious diseases – including Covid-19, Fitbit claims.

The latest Apple Watch features include a hand washing detector that tells you if you stop too soon. Also included: a sleep detector and a ‘hearing’ mode that protects your ears from audio that is too loud.

Scientists at HKUST developed the first bionic eye that replicates the structure of human eyes, but they also drew inspiration from the octopus

Xiaomi-backed wearables maker Huami published a study on detecting the spread of infectious disease using data from 1.3 million users

Fitbit, which is being acquired by Google-parent Alphabet, said in October that it planned to develop a method to detect irregular heartbeats that would match the feature available on rival Apple’s Watch.

In the age of social distancing, people might not want to handle fingerprint-smudged smartphones on display