One of the interesting things about Pebble’s smartwatch strategy is its minimalism. Feature creep has no apparent part in the company’s culture; they make watches and notification devices, and motion detectors seem to have been included in later models because they’re dirt cheap and take hardly any power.
Now, Pebble says they’ll activate the motion trackers in something called Pebble Health. But true to form, the Pebble’s doing pretty much the minimum: sending the data to either the Apple HealthKit or Google Fit ecosystem (another core value: stay open and don’t pick sides with software) and displaying not very much itself.
Pebble says it will share the aggregated data with the new Stanford University Wearable Health Lab, and plans to publish the resulting algorithm for its developers as part of a Health API.
Pebble Health will be available on all models newer than the Classic and Steel, which can continue to use tracking software from Misfit and Jawbone.