Track Steps and Turn on Your Lights with Wyze
Low cost smart security camera maker Wyze will be introducing the Wyze Band – part fitness tracker, part smart home controller. The band is supposed to have all the features one would expect in a basic fitness tracker including step counter, sleep tracker, heart rate sensor, and such. The touchscreen will allow owners to control their Wyze smart home devices…turning lights on/off or recording a video from a Wyze camera, for example. The band will also have Alexa for voice control. Pricing and availability have not yet been announced.
The NPD Take:
- Well this is a tough one. Wyze camera sales are driven by appeal for lower cost options. But the basic fitness tracker market is in decline – unit demand down 20% in 2019 (source: The NPD Group U.S. Monthly Retail Tracking) as consumers choose smart watches, or nothing at all, instead. Furthermore, with all of the ways that consumers can control their smart home devices, doing it from the wrist isn’t overly compelling…at the bottom of the list of features fitness tracker owners say are extremely or very important to have.
Home Gyms Getting Smarter
Tempo’s smart home gym uses computer vision (complements of Microsoft’s Azure Kinect) to track your form in real time, acting as that trainer that just won’t leave you alone. The Azure Kinect camera watches the user’s form and employs dots to plot movements, locating muscles and joints to ensure lifts, squats, etc. are done properly. Tempo also has the features that have become standard on the connected home gym front – classes that you can stream live or on demand, ranging from HIIT to yoga, all showing up on the 42” HD touchscreen display built in to the armoire-shaped machine. The machine also has storage racks behind and below the screen to hold barbells, weighted plates, a foam roller, and yoga mat that all come as part of the starter kit, along with a wrist-worn heart rate monitor. Tempo costs $1,995 plus a $39 monthly fee.
The NPD Take:
- If Tempo is in the budget, why not?! Having proper form is crucially important to avoid injuries and maximize fitness. Now if Tempo would automatically talk to your smoothie maker and have that protein shake ready to go post-workout, THAT would be really smart.
Eero Gets HomeKit Support
(Amazon-owned) Eero routers are getting support for HomeKit. The update will allow for more granular control over HomeKit accessories that are connected to the internet – with three levels of security that Apple offers for HomeKit accessories paired with HomeKit router, ranging from completely restricting connections to the Internet to bypassing the secure router and allowing accessories to interact with any device in your network or Internet-based service. The update is available now.
The NPD Take:
- These security features are in addition to Eero’s existing security features. Given all of the security and privacy issues plaguing the smart home industry as of late, having a more secure smart home (even if it is just for Apple customers) is only a good thing.