Redwood City, California-based smartwatch company Pebble has launched a new app for its devices, called Pebble Health.
The device first gained popularity in 2012 after it had one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns at the time for its first device, raising $10 million.
Shortly after the campaign ended, the company tapped fitness app developer RunKeeper to be the first app to integrate with the device, though users could only track their fitness if they also had their smartphone with them and the fitness app open. Then, last year, in October, Pebble added continuous fitness tracking and sleep tracking to its smartwatch. Until now, though, people could still only track their fitness if they had integrated a third party app.
The company’s newly launched Pebble Health app was developed in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University. The app tracks users’ activity and automatically detects their sleep phases. It sends data to Pebble’s user interface, called Timeline.
For example, when a user wakes up, they can view a Timeline pin that shares information about how much they slept and at the end of the day they can get access to a pin that shows their daily step count. Pebble Health shows users their progress measured against their daily step count for motivation. Data from Pebble Health can be integrated with Apple’s HealthKit or Google Fit.
Beginning early next year, Pebble will provide their developer community with access to the app’s Health API so developers can have the tools to build other apps and watch faces.