The PowerWatch, by Matrix Industries, is the first smartwatch to address the outstanding issue of battery life, the biggest inconvenience for any smartwatch.
Smartwatches have yet to develop the battery life efficient enough for daily use. Even charging them can be a pain – one can’t exactly wear the watch and charge it simultaneously.
Even with this flaw, smartwatches are a huge hit in today’s market. Knowing this, the PowerWatch was born.
What the PowerWatch lacks in capability and function it makes up for in concept and efficiency. The PowerWatch uses your own body heat against the cooler surrounding air to power itself and charge its own battery.
The more heat your body produces (take exercise, for example) the bigger the difference in temperature is created, and thus, the bigger the charge. This technology is far from new, even in watches (check out the Seiko Thermic if you don’t believe me), but the processors were always too much for this kind of power production.
As reported in Engadget, this watch makes use of the lowest-power-consuming microprocessor, called the AMBI Q to make it all possible.
PowerWatch offers much more than a smartwatch
Granted, if you’re looking for a smartwatch with a lot of features, you may want to pass this one over. The PowerWatch, ironically, isn’t powerful enough for many of the features most smartwatches make use of.
It’s possible that this technology will be made even better in the future to allow for the juice needed to bring the PowerWatch to competition. That being said, this watch has its benefits.
CNET notes that The PowerWatch is capable of tracking steps, sleep, and other activities. The watch also has a 50-meter water resistance with timer and stopwatch capabilities. The one thing this watch can boast is their accuracy in counting calories burned.
The power you produce is attributed to how many calories are being burned and is much more accurate than other methods such as motion sensors or heart rate monitors.
All of this information can be transferred to your phone via bluetooth and can be used to compare it to data from previous days. Ultimately this is a pretty great fitness watch, but the technology behind it is surely the most intriguing. .
While the watch itself isn’t something people might line up for immediately, the future of its maker, Matrix, has some brilliant plans now that they have this extremely efficient microprocessor. According to Engadget, Matrix Industries plan to implement this technology towards wireless earphones and hearing aids.
Who knows what else can now be made more efficiently due to this technology?
The bigger picture
Matrix has the bigger picture in mind. Due to this technology other products more easily made efficient can now come into play to make the consumers lives infinitely easier.
The PowerWatch may not be something, but when you see the tech behind it and have the foresight, you can see what it means for our future.
This technology will help people worldwide when it comes to battery complications. Take the technology used in this watch and put in a hearing aid, for example. No more changing batteries, how does that sound?
To-date, battery is a central issue in any piece of tech and has been for many years. This issue has been addressed time and again, increasing the demand and race for more… Users ultimately want battery life to be a problem of the past.
While we are receiving more and more answers like solar energy and kinetic energy, we’re not out of the woods yet. This watch is the hope many people were looking for to meet their everyday needs with low powered devices.
The only question is if they can improve it to work on high powered devices.