Baltimore-based athletic apparel manufacturer Under Armour announced a collaboration with HTC last year. The companies together launched the HTC Grip which was a fitness band. Taking their tech to the next level, the collaboration recently unveiled the UA Healthbox, which is a set of a band, a strap and a scale. The three units will work together to monitor your fitness.
The UA Healthbox consists of a wrist-worn fitness tracker (UA Band), chest-worn heart monitor (UA Heart Rate), and Wi-Fi-enabled smart scale (UA Scale). These three individual devices collect data from the user and feed it to a newly-released version of the UA Record app, available to both iOS and Android users.
The UA Band is like a slimmer version of the HTC grip. It has an LED display to show you basic info like the time, notifications and your heart-rate. It monitors your heart by using a green optical sensor. The design is very simple and comfy too.The band tracks steps and sleep, can record exercises and gets notifications. It doesn’t have a built-in GPS. It is 2ATM water resistant for showering.
The UA Heart Rate is a chest strap that monitors your heart-rate and measures your calorific burn and other estimates. According to Under Armour, the Band isn’t quite precise in measuring the heart-rate, so it is a good idea to pair it up with a chest strap. This can pair up with the Band for accurate heart-rate measurement or directly to the UA Record app to write the database.
The UA Scale, on the other hand, is a simple scale with advanced conductive paint technology that can measure weight and body fat percentage. It can be used to store data of up to 8 users, including guests.
All the three components support either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to link with your smartphone and communicate with UA Record.
The whole set of three will be available in the US on the 22nd of January at around $400. Global release is expected to be sometime later this year.
