Whoop has made screen-free wearables since its first proper release in 2015, but the shift in what Whoop considers itself to be about mirrors the change we see in the wider market. Today a Whoop band is made for just about anyone with the spare cash to pay for its $199 annual subscription. It’s a system to “help you improve how you sleep, train, and feel—starting day one,” to use Whoop’s own words. This couldn’t be further removed from the self-serious way Whoop described itself in 2015, as a “performance optimization system exclusively designed for elite athletes and teams.” What a change a decade makes.
Even if Whoop has always been grounded in the now-common concept of “training readiness,” things have altered drastically. So while it’s tempting to say Google’s Fitbit and company are playing catch-up with Whoop, that’s not quite it. It has homed in on the “low-distraction” lifestyle selling point just as the other bigger tech companies have.
On at least three fronts this can be attributed—or blamed—on AI, to some extent.
AI as the Good and Bad Guy
AI is a way for these wearable companies to upsell and make money, and on the other side, a major contributor to why a lot of us feel like we need low-distraction tech these days in the first place. While virtually every Whoop rival says it can be used without a subscription, some of these companies lean heavily on AI as an upsell.
Take Google and the Fitbit Air. Without a subscription, the app looks cute enough but is fairly spare. You get stats and charts, but if you want chatty explainers of what any of it means, you need Google Health Premium at $10 a month. Numbers and graph lines become paragraphs that reference specific quirks or events of the day because, to steal a line from humorist and podcaster John Hodgman, specificity is the soul of narrative.
And this is just the beginning. “The use of AI in monitoring and guiding health and wellness is still at the early stage of development but will likely become significantly more advanced as AI matures,” says Peter Richardson, vice president and cofounder of Counterpoint Research.
I find Google Fitbit’s chatbot ramblings quite annoying, with not-that-rare dips into the condescending, and I may even prefer the subscription-free experience. But my job has pushed me through the unenviable task of learning what VO2 Max actually means, what heart-rate variability trends indicate, and so on: not the norm.
AI could solve that long-standing issue with wearables—people glazing over data as soon as they see anything more than their daily step count. This AI use will be better represented on the phone than the watch screen, too, making the lack of screen a strength. It lets the AI shine.
Technostress
The most important influence of AI here is on the other side of the equation, though, as just the latest stage in the tech-ification of our daily lives. I’ve heard from multiple friends about how their recent work appraisals focused on higher-ups demanding greater AI use within their “personal workflow.” Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience.
Elizabeth Marsh, a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham who studies the dark side of the digital workplace, finds that digital tools consistently trigger a familiar cluster of harms: technostress, information overload, constant interruption, and blurred work–home boundaries.