The best smartwatches and fitness trackers are good at showing you your current health data, but there aren’t many that can predict how you’ll be feeling mentally and physically in the future. The new Citizen CZ Smart watch to forecast your energy levels, and I just got to see how it works at CES 2023.
As a Wear OS 3 watch, the Citizen CZ Smart has the full suite of “smarts” you’d expect, such as notifications, a voice assistant built-in, NFC payments and more. It also has basic fitness tracking features. So, to stand out in the Android smartwatch space, the CZ is launching with a proprietary program that analyzes the user’s behaviors to predict when they’ll have the most (or least) energy on a daily basis.
Update: The Citizen CZ Smart is one of our picks for the Best of CES 2023 Awards. Find out what other products took top honors at this year's show.
By tracking your activity and mental alertness, the CZ Smart YouQ app determines the user’s "chronotype." A chronotype is someone’s natural tendencies to sleep at a certain time. When a chronotype is recognized, the YouQ app can begin to guess a user’s power gauge throughout the day.
I’ve seen smartwatches and fitness trackers use a "body battery" or power metric before, but those only represent your current energy level based on sleep and activity. The CZ YouQ feature emphasizes mental alertness as much as activity collected from the watch, hoping to understand which points of the day you’re at your strongest — mentally speaking.
In the first few days with a CZ Smart and YouQ, app will take you through a 1-minute mental alertness test a few times a day. The first 7-10 days are the most critical for YouQ’s AI (powered by IBM Watson) to determine a chronotype. After that, you’ll be assigned a behavior profile which Citizen has branded with labels like “Morning Go Getters” or “Midday Dynamos.” These categories basically summarize when during the day your energy levels are highest.
Citizen CZ Smart price and availability
Interested in having your future predicted by a smartwatch? The Citizen CZ Smart will become available in March 2023, though it's available for pre-order on Amazon. It comes in two variations: a lifestyle model (41mm) that starts at $350 and sportier model (44mm) that starts at $375. Strap choices will come at a premium.
Unlike some other Wear OS watches, the CZ Smart is compatible with both Android and iOS devices. So anyone who thinks AI analyzing their energy levels sounds awesome can give CZ YouQ a go.
