Every year CES – the Consumer Electronics Show – introduces us to a treasure trove of innovative technologies, and that’s no truer than in the fitness and wearables category. CES 2024 has been no different.
At last year’s conference, we saw a displayless smartwatch, smart beds for athletes, and an at-home pee tester (kinda yucky, but potentially a handy health accessory).
This year we (thankfully) don’t have toilet-based gadgets we want to highlight, but there are plenty of other fitness and wearable gadgets we’ve loved finding out more about – and have even got hands-on time with to see if they can live up to the hype.
Here are some of the best wearables and fitness tech from CES 2024 including a glove that counters Parkinson’s tremors, fitness headphones with an in-built AI coach, and a smartwatch we could see surviving anything.
Smartwatches at CES 2024
There’s usually a handful of smartwatches on display at CES, typically sleek sophisticated-looking things that combine fitness tracking with an elegant electronic timepiece.
That’s true of the newly announced Garmin Lily 2 which boasts a “petite, fashionable” smartwatch design – coming in at just 20.6g – and a hidden display that shows a patterned background until tapped. It’s also plenty useful with connected GPS – although no built-in GPS, which would have been a huge upgrade for runners and cyclists over the original Garmin Lily – as well as five days of battery life, sleep scores, menstrual cycle tracking, and a pulse oximeter for checking your blood oxygen levels. It’s available now for $249.99 / £249.99, with Australia prices TBC.
Garmin also launched the HRM-Fit heart rate monitor which has been tailored specifically for people who wear medium and high-support sports bras. It offers all the same real-time workout information tracking in a package that should be more comfortable for sports bra wearers than traditional Garmin heart rate monitors.
If you instead want a smartwatch that looks like it would survive a nuclear explosion there’s the Casio G-Shock Rangeman GPR-H1000. It features heart rate monitoring, a pulse oximeter, built-in GPS, and Casio's Triple Sensor for measuring altitude, compass bearing, and temperature. Casio’s smartwatch can also give you sunrise and sunset times, and global tide data making though it comes at a price. When it launches on January 20 it’ll set you back $500 / £449 (around AU$750).
Smart rings at CES 2024
Smart rings are becoming all the rage – they’re like fitness watches but pack all of their health-tracking sensors into a ring that’s a lot less bulky and distracting.
The 4g Amazfit Helio ring is coming to claim Oura’s crown at the top of our best smart rings list with its promises of detailed sleep tracking and readiness scoring that could help you improve your running and cycling workouts. Though to access its premium analysis features you’ll need to pay $69.99 (approx £75 / AU$105) per year.
Conversely, the women-first Evie smart ring offers a one-and-done approach. The ring is not only packed with helpful trackers for sleep, blood oxygen, and heart health, but it also has an AI that can look at this info as well as logs related to your menstrual cycle, mood, and activity levels to provide insight on what has positive impacts on your health – such as noting that the days you log more steps than average are days your mood is higher.
It even has an open ring design to account for the changes in women’s finger sizes at different points in their menstrual cycle. The Evie smart ring launches later this January but only in the US for $269.
Fitness headphones at CES 2024
Music can be a powerful workout tool with powerful tunes helping you to push through a workout, or distract you from how tired you’re feeling on your long run. But Mojawa’s new bone conduction headphones want to take things further with an AI sports trainer who can help you take your training further, apparently.
With vibration-based training guidance Mojawa’s HaptiFit Terra headphones’ AI “elevate workouts into complete training sessions with automatically generated exercise plans.” How this looks in practice is anyone’s guess but when it launches in the next couple of months – the official release date is Q1 2024 – we should find out.
The gadget is currently on presale for $199.99 / £239.99 – slightly cheaper than the $299.99 retail price (Australian and UK release prices to come in the future). On top of the AI you’ll get headphones with an IP68 water resistance rating and 32GB of on-board music storage that’s controlled by pressure-sensitive haptic controls.
Sennheiser also introduced a new set of Momentum Sport headphones, with built-in fitness tracking and PPG heart rate sensor, as well as the full range of Polar's impressive fitness metrics. The Sport buds go on sale on the 9th of April with a selling price of $329.95 / €329.99 / around AU$492.14.
Health wearables at CES 2024
The most innovative health tech shown off at CES can be a total game changer for the people it helps. In the case of the GyroGlove it’s helping to give people suffering from Parkinson's some of their independence back.
By working to counter her tremors Roberta Wilson-Garrett – a person with Parkinson’s – told us that she can make herself a cup of tea, button her shirt, and eat something using utensils thanks to the FDA Class-1 approved glove. In a live demonstration, we saw a stark contrast between her ability to draw with and without the glove.
The GyroGlove is available to buy right now – though each hand will cost you $5,899 (around £4,600 / AU$8.800) – but CES is also a chance to see the future of health tech, like the Vixion 01 specs.
This sci-fi visor isn’t yet another Apple Vision Pro competitor. They’re glasses that can automatically correct your vision so whatever you’re looking at is always in focus. The clear advantage being you’d only need to buy one pair of specs for the rest of your life. If your vision changes the Vixion 01 will adjust itself so you can still see with perfect clarity. The only downside is we don’t know when it’ll release, or how much it’ll be at launch.
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