Whoop, founded by a Harvard student athlete, is different from an Apple Watch or Garmin. There is no screen and it detects activity automatically, sampling biometrics about 100 times a second.

It is part of a fitness craze that has gripped the world, with the overall worth about $US70.3bn ($107.7bn) globally, according to MarketsandMarkets, and is expected to surge to $US152.8bn by 2029.

People are tracking themselves like never before, with Apple and Samsung packing in more health monitoring features into their watches to capitalise on the trend.

But Whoop is taking a different approach to the tech titans. It charges a subscription model, with three tiers priced from $299 to $629 a year.

This compares with Apple and Samsung both charging a one-off cost of $649 for their respective base 10 and 8 series watches.

Whoop senior vice president of research Emily Capodilupo says the subscription model allows the company to develop features that would otherwise be too expensive to launch. This includes incorporating OpenAI into its app to create personalised coaching based on users data.

“Our interests are more tightly aligned with our members. If we think of ourselves as a hardware company, and all your money is made at point of sale – and in fact any time you use the product, I lose money because I need to power the app that you’re using and at the back end crunch all your data – you’re actually misaligned to your member base,” Capodilupo says.

“It’s like, ‘I want you to like this enough to get your friend to buy it, but not enough that you use it a lot’. That’s what we found in our first couple of years. We were originally a hardware, kind of traditional hardware company. You bought Whoop for $500 and then you never paid us again until you bought the next Whoop for $500 a couple years later.

“What we found with the subscription is that it just allows us to align our incentives in a really productive way. Because, you know, some of our members are paying monthly so every month, we have to earn the right to keep their business.”

Whoop aims to be different to other fitness trackers by providing personalised health and fitness coaching, while focusing on sleep, strain and recovery metrics. It can provide a ‘Whoop age’, which reveals whether your physiology is younger or older than your chronological age.

It’s also designed never to be taken off, with charging performed by sliding a small portable power bank onto the sensor.

The integration with OpenAI also allows users to integrate their data and find out ways they can improve. For example if you’re a runner and your strain score is high you can ask how you can reduce that to help prevent injury. Whoop then provides tips, based on your activity, such as incorporating interval training to build strength.

Via it’s app, it also provides a daily outlook and tips to improve performance based on an individual user’s data. When I tested it on Friday morning, it told me rain was forecast and that should consider a treadmill session if the wet weather persisted.

The recovery score measures how equipped your body is to perform athletic activities based on a user’s heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep and respiratory rate. The recovery score percentage is colour coded as green, meaning you can handle a strenuous day; yellow, can handle moderate amounts of strain; and red, which means rest is needed. This is calculated daily.

“Other wearables that people chart overnight … just aren’t well positioned to then say, ‘OK, I actually understand how you Jared woke up this morning, and therefore how you should think about approaching the day,” Capodilupo says.

“And so at best, they sort of end up doing these very generic goals of like, just hit your 10,000 steps and close the loop, or things like that.

“It (Whoop) is dynamic to your own physiology”.

But sometimes this has led to unexpected results. When founder Will Ahmed wanted to put his device to the test 12 years ago, he turned to the Harvard men’s squash team – he had been a member himself.

“These were Harvard undergraduates, so type A, division one athletes – a bunch of competitive folks,” Capodilupo says.

“And we gave like, the equivalent of like, Cs and Ds at sleep. They had never gotten bad grades in their life. They were just mind blown to understand. And so you have some people who might get these really powerful wake up calls.”

So is wearing a smart fitness tracker the equivalent of eating an apple a day to keep the doctor away. Marc Hermann, founder and chief executive of Melbourne-based longevity clinic Everlab, says while wearables are a great way for people to better understand their health, they don’t substitute a full suite of diagnostics.

“I do think we’re still pretty far away from the Theranos, getting all your blood markers from a drop of blood,” Mr Hermann says, referring to Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of fraud for making false and misleading claims.

“But they (wearables) will definitely be playing a role. They will definitely be getting better, particularly for some of these lifestyle, physical fitness markers.

“I just don’t see them replacing really the deeper diagnostics, like extended blood panel, because unfortunately, for those like you still need to take, like, eight, nine cannulas of blood to really understand what is happening. Therefore, we see them being more complementary to what we are doing.”

 

This article first appeared in The Australian as Longevity unlocked: this AI wearable could transform your life (and add years)