Pebble adds fitness tracking to Time smartwatches

Pebble has released firmware 3.8 for its Time smartwatches. The software update adds Pebble Health, which can measure steps and sleep activity. Pebble will also open the Health API to developers in early 2016.

With ‘personal successes’, Pebble wants to encourage its users to stay active. Rather than aiming for a set number of steps, smartwatch wearers can measure their daily progress against their personal average. The Health stats integrate with the timeline on the Pebble watches and can also be viewed in the app.

According to the makers, Pebble Health was developed in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University’s Wearable Health lab. By making the ‘correct’ data available to researchers in a transparent manner, they should be able to carry out better studies. It is not clear from Pebble’s wording exactly how and which data is shared.

Pebble Health is compatible with Google Fit and Apple HealthKit. In addition, Pebble wants developers to get started with Health and will therefore make an API available in early 2016. This allows applications and watchfaces to be created that use the data collected by Pebble Health.

Firmware 3.8 is available for the Pebble Time, Time Steel and Time Round. Older versions of the smartwatch don’t get Pebble Health. An update was released on Tuesday for the Pebble Classic and Pebble Steel that adds the timeline and removes the limit of eight apps or watchfaces. A test version of this update was already released last week.