The health, fitness and wellness industries are booming – and it shows in tech too. There are lots of new fitness trackers, apps and other devices available to buy that are designed to help you take better care of your physical and mental wellbeing.Sure, fitness tech has been around for a long time, but now there’s more focus on a more holistic approach to wellness.
We know what you’re thinking: do we really need a smart water bottle? For most of us, the answer is no. This isn’t tech that you need, but a great-looking water bottle is the must-have gym accessory – why not make it smart?
Reusing an old Evian bottle just won’t cut it anymore. Not only is it bad for the environment to rely on plastic bottles, but they don’t look good and they’re not built to withstand trips to the gym or the yoga studio.
That’s why well-designed water bottles have become popular recently.It makes sense then that a number of companies are banking on our love for fancy water bottles, our love for tracking our health and fitness, and our love for our smartphones.But what makes this next generation of water bottles smart? Are they really more useful than useless? And is hydration tech becoming an important sub-section of wellness tech in its own right?
Drinking enough water each day is an important part of improving your health and fitness. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of stats suggesting very few of us are drinking enough water. A recent study found one in five people don’t drink any water on a given day – relying on calorie-packed, super sugary drinks instead.
Although we could probably all do with downing a little more H2O throughout the day, smart water bottles still aren’t going to appeal to everyone.
The category is too small to find any official buying data. But we imagine smart water bottles will predominantly appeal to those who take their health and fitness seriously and see hydration as another part of the well-being puzzle – it certainly seems to be these people that they’re marketed at.
However, let’s not overlook some of the less obvious reasons people might need a smart water bottle. There are those who could require lots of hydration for health reasons, the elderly who may forget to drink enough without a reminder, or those in jobs that require a lot of concentration at the detriment of eating and drinking.
Smart water bottles follow many of the same principles as other kinds of fitness tech and trackers. They remind you to pick up good habits, they monitor what you do, they sometimes add gaming elements to your daily life, and they help you set – and stick to – goals.
Aside from the tech, many of the smart water bottles we’ve tried so far are also really well-designed and are good for keeping your water cool in their own right. You don’t have to compromise on looks for tech smarts.