Review on Spire Stone: Smart Stress Management and Fitness Tracker for iOS & Android by Stephen Johnson

I've been using Spire for about 3 weeks now and was thinking how to write a review about it. I decided to give the product 5 stars. If I could I would give it 4.5 but that's not an option and I really think it deserves more than 4 stars. I am not going to describe what the product does, if you are reading this you probably already know this and are trying to find out if it actually works. I will list what I really like about the product and what I would like to change. The positives: Getting real-time notifications when I'm not breathing properly is just huge. I was on the phone in a meeting and got a notification on my iPhone that it's been a while since I took a deep breath. Of course, Spiel was right. It was just a nice little nudge, a reminder to get back to what I know to be important, which is full and functional breathing. - the ability to track my day when I'm calm, when I'm focused, when I'm stressed. , this is really useful information. Spire can be better in this regard, and I'll talk more about that in a moment. The data presentation and tracking isn't as polished as I'd like, but is it better than what I did before Spire (i.e. nothing)? Oh damn yes. - Notifications are great. They adjust them according to their preferences and now the app gives you real-time feedback. If I've been tense for 3 minutes, the tower will tell me. If I've been in a long period of stillness or concentration, I'll see it too. And it's useful for identifying what I did/thought/focused on to create that state. These are recordings that you can listen to to increase your sense of calm or focus, boost your energy, etc. This is a good library of resources. And they have a nice "Basic Package" that teaches you some basic breathing techniques and introduces you to your device and app. Last but not least, I love having such a humble device to track my steps. I don't wear a pedometer or a fitness watch, so it's nice that the Spire does that for me. Some issues noted by others were not a problem for me at all. I wear it on my belt and at first thought it would bother me. And it really pissed me off, absolutely. Approximately 45 minutes. After that, I literally forget he's on top of me. It's just not a problem. There are also no connection problems. Setup was easy and it stays connected to my iPhone 6+ with no issues. Things I would like to improve: - There are times when I feel tense, but Spire doesn't recognize it as such. I understand my perspective is thought as the Spire measures actual breathing patterns. I guess that means I still breathe well even when I'm emotionally stressed. Relax. I'd really like to be able to tweak the sensitivity of the algorithm or increase the "difficulty" to make it take longer to register as Quiet, but that's a relatively minor bug. The Gain section is responsible for unlocking the next Gain after hearing the previous one. Instead of making it available immediately, it waits until 9am the next business day. So if I hear a boost on a Friday afternoon, I won't unlock the next one until Monday morning. It's just brain dead design. It might be easier to get more useful data from the app. For example, if I was just going through a period of calm or focus, I'd like to be able to add a tag to mark what I did during that period. This would make sense from an analytical point of view. And good news, the last two questions? They will be fixed directly in the next version of the Spire app. They're in beta and I've looked at it and while it's still imperfect it shows promise and addresses both of these issues head-on. Conclusion: I find the device and the app very useful at the moment. built. I emailed the company some thoughts, criticisms and suggestions and was impressed to receive a thorough and thoughtful response from one of the company's founders and chief scientists. We had nice dialogue, so while I'm impressed with what the app can do at the moment, I think what it's going to do will only get better and better. So, do I recommend buying this now? Yes, I am absolutely sure. I genuinely believe this is one of the few wearable technologies that not only gives you tons of data that is essentially meaningless, but can actually improve your quality of life in important and meaningful ways.