This year’s CES isn’t coming up short in the smartwatch department by any means. We’ve seen Fossil take the wraps off its new Gen 6 Hybrid Wellness, and now, Citizen is debuting its new CZ Smart with technology from two of the biggest names in computing and science: IBM and NASA.
On the outside, it seems like an ordinary Wear OS smartwatch. It has all the specs to compete with the best of them, but one feature helps to set it apart: the YouQ app. It’s a wellness tracking tool that uses neural networks developed within the IBM Watson Studio workspace to understand the wearer’s chronotype (a.k.a. their preferred sleep and wake times). It can also measure your alertness using technology from NASA’s Psychomotor Vigilance Task Test (PVT+), which was originally built to help determine the mental acuity of astronauts.
Using the technology, the YouQ app can deliver Alert Scores, sleeping patterns, chronotype, activity, and heart monitoring, all while learning about the wearer’s unique characterization, rhythms, and habits to optimize the fitness experience of the watch. After you’ve been wearing it for a little while, the watch will begin to offer suggestions to reduce fatigue, increase alertness, and adopt healthier habits. You can view all of this data in the CZ Smart YouQ app on your phone.
A lot of watches have been focusing more on wellness than general fitness tracking (namely Samsung and Fossil), and the CZ Smart YouQ takes it a step further with the added technologies from IBM and NASA. Whether any of that is actually useful remains to be seen, but it certainly sounds promising.
“The latest CZ Smart watch is a game-changing product that brings Citizen’s legacy of watchmaking together with best-in-class research and technology of NASA and IBM, directly to wearers’ wrists,” said Jeffrey Cohen, present of Citizen Watch America. “Coupled with the proprietary CZ Smart YouQ application, this smartwatch is a revolution in wearable wellness.”
Beyond YouQ, Citizen’s new CZ Smart is also a straightforward Wear OS 3 watch. It boasts a 1.3-inch AMOLED display with a Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus processor inside, 8GB of storage, “24+ hour battery life,” and compatibility with both Android and iOS. There’s also a hybrid model that drops Wear OS 3 but keeps the YouQ features and gets you much longer battery life.
The Wear OS-powered CZ Smart comes in 41mm “Casual” and 44mm “Sport” models. It launches on March 1st and will be priced at $350 and $375, respectively. It will be available through Citizen’s website.
Expensive watch