As for the calorie counting itself, you get a series of figures breaking down the calories taken in, and how many are fat, carbs and protein. A graph then shows you absorption over the past day, running from midnight to midnight. It’s good to note that you’ll see spikes in calorie burn in the small hours of the morning too, as your body works through the day’s food.
Unlike the first-generation GoBe, you don’t need to tell the device when you’re going to eat; it does it all automatically. So looking at the graph for an average day, there’s a lot of burning as I sleep, and then a big spike shortly after I eat breakfast. Then the graph spikes shrink through the morning before shooting back up again at lunchtime, and so forth. While I wasn’t expecting a constant and precise record of my consumption, I found the tracking to be pretty close to my handwritten notes.
Hydration is another issue, and the watch is obsessed with ensuring that I get enough fluids, even though I thought I was a good drinker. It will often buzz at me, instructing me to take on more water, even if I’m on the cusp of falling asleep — at least until I’d set its reminder window to remind me to drink only during daylight hours. After all, at one point I was full to bursting after I chain-drank the better part of three liters of green tea, and I was still being advised that I needed to drink more.
Similarly, the sleep tracking is some of the most accurate I’ve seen, outlining periods of REM sleep, stress and anxiety through the night. Similarly, it’s the first “stress”-counting wearable that has actually worked, vibrating with the warning “Emotion” during a particularly fractious conversation with my other half. It all adds up to a device that actually kinda does what was promised, which is probably the biggest surprise of all of this.
The questions that linger are simple: whether Apple will adopt a technology like this in a future version of its watch, and if it can be tweaked to calculate blood sugar. On the first point, the biggest obstacle to its use would be the GoBe’s atrocious battery life — it lasts 24 hours between charges. The Watch itself has an even shorter lifespan, and it would take a radical redesign to make it practical.
As for whether the technology could be used to track blood sugar levels, that will come down to how well the algorithms can be tweaked. If Healbe’s Flow technology is legitimate, and it does turn out to be capable of tracking food consumption, then it’s entirely plausible and possible. Although Apple will be held to a vastly higher standard than Healbe, especially given the latter company’s lack of credibility.
Testing this device, I expected very little from it, believing that its signature feature was simply too impossible to work. But the Healbe GoBe 2 is a very good health and fitness tracker, offering insights and proactive advice that I appreciate in a wearable device. It offers lifestyle metrics that other companies would dream of being able to offer, and reading my stats has become a mild obsession. As a consequence, the company has earned a second chance at a first impression.
