IT'S almost 6pm and as I am about to pack my stuff to go home, my Apple Watch buzzes and a message pops up on the screen together with the almost completed colourful activity rings, which track my move, stand and exercise.
I just need to move a round for a few minutes and I will be able to complete my activity rings, which marks that I've achieved my fitness goal for the day, as part of my initiative to stay active and healthy.
Having used the Apple Watch for a few years now, I can say that the device has become a "personal" motivator and trainer in staying healthy and fit.
While staying active and healthy is now very much part of the modern society lifestyle, the availability of fitness wearables like the Apple Watch is making living a healthier lifestyle even easier.
Today, it tracks dozens of exercises, including new ones that people never thought could be measured, like Yoga.
The watch goes beyond just counting steps or tracking calories, instead focusing more on the overall health.
Staying healthy and beyond
Jay Blahnik, Apple’s senior director of fitness and health technologies, says one of the things that Apple learned from the consumers is that people use the Apple Watch for many different reasons.
"Many are gravitating towards three different specific areas that they find the most useful of the watch, which are staying connected, staying healthy and staying active," he says.
In the area of staying connected, the watch has become more independent of the phone where users can take the calls, get messages without having to have the phone nearby.
"Now you can get the most important things that you need to do on your wrist without having to access your phone," he says.
Besides that, for the elderly, the watch is able to alert their loved ones if they experience a fall.
Designing the watch
The Apple Watch has evolved with more features over the years, but its key task is to be able to motivate users throughout the day, and at the same time be a highly intelligent and smart sport watch.
"We recognise that some people do workouts and some do sports but most of the population don’t do that, and they want to be healthier by moving throughout the day," says Blahnik, adding that how one measures his or her day is not the same how he or she measures his or her run.
"So it’s very clear to us that we could not just throw some metrics to the consumers and expect them to be motivated for a behavioural change," he says.
"And that was one of the things that’s very clear from the beginning, but it’s quite hard to do because most people just focus on the metrics and we knew that to really change behaviour it had to be almost emotional, it couldn’t just be numbers, it had to be an experience," he adds.
Fitness in mind
It was as we knew that while there we a lot of other delightful things that the device on your wrist could do, one of the expectations is that it would help you get healthier and be more active.
"We knew from the very beginning that it is our most personal device ever. Because it would have the opportunity to learn about you, to be able to measure you with its sensors close to your body. So fitness is something what we’ve been thinking about since the very beginning," says Blahnik, adding that having the watch on the body allows users to measure even the most subtle things like sitting or standing.
Meanhwhile, the phone can be by the user's side all the day but it doesn’t know if the user is sitting the entire time or standing.
The workouts
One of the things that is unique about the Apple Watch is that it has GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer and a heart rate monitor. Having those four sensors available allows users to look at different activities in different ways and it also allows them to measure more things.
"For example, if you’re outdoor running or walking, we have the GPS available to measure how fast you’re walking but sometimes you walk in an area where the GPS gets blocked out, and the watch is able to rely on the accelerometer to see how far you’re going during those moments when the GPS is blocked out," says Blahnik.
However, he says to measure calorie, it’s not just important to measure speed but to see what your heart rate is doing.
"If you're wearing an Apple watch for a bike ride, you can use the GPS to measure the speed but when you're riding downhill and going really fast and if all you have is speed you might get more calorie credit then you deserve, but you're going downhill and not working as hard. The watch is able to fuse the sensors together and look at the heart rate as well as the speed and understand that while you're going fast you're not necessarily working as hard," explains Blahnik.
The same goes to swimming. A freestyle stroke and a breast stroke burn different amount of calories, and counting someone heart rate in the pool won't be able to give them the accurate reading on the workout they're doing.
"But the accelerometer and gyroscope in the watch allow us to detect those nuances and provide the most accurate calorie reading for the most amount of activity," he says.
Motivating factor
Many people see that measurement can be a motivation.
"Even if you're a beginner or not into working out, the ability to see that you went a little far today than yesterday can be a great motivation to use," says Blahnik.
"What we know from science is that a 10 minute walk, the few extra steps, or the few flight of stairs, which probably doesn't mean anything for your health, but a few of it everyday makes a huge difference across your lifetime," he says.
As the watch can connect you to your family with its activity sharing feature, where a user may get a message from his cousin who lives a thousand mile away and see that he is a head of him will make him motivated to exercise more.
"It used to be that people work out with their workout buddies, but people are busy nowadays and the fact that we can get connected digitally is great," says Blahnik.
The popular apps
Of the many apps on the Apple Watch, the Acitivity App seems to be the most popular.
"Initially I think that the workout app would be popular among people who like working out, but the area that we’ve been most surprised is how the activity app has remained to be the most popular app on the watch where people have obsession with closing their rings, trying to be active everyday," says Blahnik.
"Partly because it’s automatic and its easy, the rings are also compelling where everybody wants to do good to their body but they don’t want to think about it. It encourages people to close the ring by asking them to walk around," he says.
As the activity app is popular among users, Apple has also added features like coaching, badges, celebration, activity sharing as well as competition.
"We continue to add features that help people to close more rings but in different areas as we realised that not all people are motivated by the same thing," says Blahnik.
Closing the rings
Closing the rings is one of the more popular activities on the Apple watch.
"Before we ever thought about the design we asked ourselves what should we measure, because the paradigm that everyone expected was to measure steps. However, from a science standpoint, steps is a measure of quantity, while quantity is important in an activity, we should also measure intensity and frequency," says Blahnik.
For example, someone may be able to get the steps in a day, but none of those steps are equivalent of a brisk walk. So even though they move enough, they didn’t move briskly enough to get that health benefits.
"In the beginning we said that steps/quantity is not the only measurement. There should be quantity, intensity and frequency. So it started as an idea that instead of one measurement there should be three. However, we don’t want it to be complicated, we want it to be delightful almost like a game. And it’s very important to use that it should be glanceable on the wrist. So instead of staring at a bunch of numbers, it should be very easy for people to know when they hit their goal, a feeling of satisfaction that they completed the goal. The idea is that they just don’t be focusing on a single metric but actually on a completion of a goal," says Blahnik.
"The rings were the perfect analogy because you could see, where you’re at in a day, and you could see how much far you have to go and you could also get credit by going round again. It was perfect for the watch as it’s glanceable, easy to see, but also it became almost an imperative - close your rings should be like a metaphor on how you should treat your active day," he says.
Many people know that closing the ring is what you should do in a day to be active.
“But of course people can still get illness or disease but being active is the least you can do to improve your health.
“Many doctors tell us that if being more active is a prescription it would be the more prescribed medicine in the world,” he concludes.