We’ve seen our first hints that the long-awaited Fitbit Sense 2 may be in production, and we’ll be gathering all the rumors and news together right here as soon as it emerges.
The original Fitbit Sense was something quite special when it launched back in September 2020, and earned a place high up our ranking of the best Fitbits. While many smartwatches and fitness trackers estimate stress levels by monitoring your heartrate variability, the Sense took a different approach by measuring something called electrodermal activity (or EDA).
This is basically the electroconductivity of your skin, and it’s affected by sweat. The more active your adrenal glands, the more sweat you produce, and the more conductive your skin becomes. When you activate the EDA app on the Fitbit Sense and place your palm over the screen, the watch sends a tiny electrical current through your skin, and uses a sensor to detect how the conductivity of your skin changes over the course of a minute. The more changes (or ‘EDA responses’) are reported, the more stressed you’re likely to be.
It was novel tech at the time, but now Fitbit has incorporated it into the smaller, more affordable Fitbit Charge 5, the upcoming Sense 2 will need to offer something even more impressive.
Cut to the chase
- What is it? Fitbit’s next stress-sensing smartwatch
- When it it out? Possibly around August 2022
- What will it cost? Likely around $330 / £300 / AU$500
Fitbit Sense 2 news and leaks
In late March 2022, references to three new devices were spotted in the install files for Fitbit’s Android app. Two of the new watches have square displays with a resolution of 336 x 336 pixels – the same as the Fitbit Versa 3 and Fitbit Sense – while the third has a rectangular screen with a resolution of 124 × 208 pixels. That’s the same as the Fitbit Luxe, but since the Luxe only landed in April 2021, we think it’s more likely that the Fitbit Inspire is getting a screen upgrade.
The Fitbit Versa 3, Fitbit Sense, and Fitbit Inspire 2 launched simultaneously back in 2020, so it would make sense for their successors to land at the same time too. The two square watches are codenamed ‘Rhea’ and ‘Hera’, which are believed to be Star Wars references (in line with Fitbit’s previous sci-fi heavy naming conventions), while the rectangular device is ‘Nyota’.
What we want to see
There’s no other information available at the moment, but we suspect that the Fitbit Sense 2 may have an exciting new feature in the form of all-day EDA monitoring, which tests for EDA responses without you activating the app manually, and alerts you if stress levels appear too high.
It recently came to light that Google (Fitbit’s parent company) has submitted an application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for an algorithm that will allow its watches to monitor for signs of atrial fibrillation passively throughout the day. If the watch detects an irregular heartbeat, it will verify the reading with further checks, then give you an alert on the watch face if it’s consistently concerning.
EDA monitoring could be done in exactly the same way, and Google might not need FDA approval for it – which would explain why we’ve not seen a similar application for this technology.
This could be the winning feature that gives the Fitbit Sense 2 the edge, and could prompt us to choose it over the recently released Fitbit Charge 5, which features EDA detection but requires the wearer to initiate it manually and spend a full minute with their palm over the watch face.
We’ll be keeping an ear to the ground for further news and potential leaks surrounding the Fitbit Sense 2, and will keep this article updated as soon as more hints emerge.
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