14 DAY TRIAL // This weekend, we brought you the story of the Pavlok, a very odd wearable which is advertised as being able to shock you into behaving the right way (according to your own set of goals and such).
Today, we’re going to be talking about a gentler counterpart, which is called the Spark smartwatch. As we have become accustomed with wearables these days, they aim to impress by offering niche features that should appeal to a certain kind of crowd.
The Spark smartwatch, for example, wants to keep you awake. We all had our moments, dozing off while we were watching a movie, or even worse in class or while driving our car on a long empty road.
The Spark is smart enough to sense when your senses start failing you and will send a hefty jog to your wrist that is said to be able to wake up even the heaviest sleeper. Challenge accepted!
The Spark takes advantage of two sensors, which work to track the wearer’s movement speed and frequency in order to “understand” when you’re starting to fall asleep.
This might be something a little more complicated to achieve if you’re in a car, but nevertheless, we suppose you’re moving your hands on the wheels and such.
Don’t worry, the Spark won’t prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep. When you are finally ready to call it a night and go back to bed, you can just disable Spark’s motion sensor and go off into wonderland, uninterrupted. Or you can just take the device off your wrist.
The Spark is kept alive by a Li-Ion battery that can last up to five to seven days, depending on the amount of times you end up dozing off in your chair.
The Spark is currently up on Kickstarter and already managed to successfully surpass its $6,000 / €4,408 funding goal. The project founders have now decided to extend the goal to $14,000 / €10,285, which will allow them to make the watch 25% thinner and add an improved battery to it.
What we’re not being told is whether the watch can relay notifications for email and social media, just like any similar device we have seen so far.
In the video outlining the product, we find out the watch face will only display basic data, including the time, date and how much battery life you have left. We’re also told that users can adjust the sensitivity of the watch (in translation, how loud you get buzzed) by pushing the physical button located on the side of the device.
