Wearables May Soon Track Heartbreak, Orgasms in Real Time

The new FitBit Blaze is seen at a press conference on CES Press Day, January 5, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada ahead of the CES 2016 Consumer Electronics Show.

Four decades after mood rings first offered emotional insight in a convenient, (arguably) fashionable package, a wave of digital mood-tracking wearables is seeking to help users share their feelings–likely much more accurately–from a clinical, data-driven perspective.

Over the past few years, biometric tech has kept advancing in well-measured leaps and bounds, and its ever-growing range of applications suggests we may soon have access to personalized stats on more than our workouts. Last summer, TechCruch rounded up some of the ways that wearable tech could be tracking not just users’ physical health but also their mental and emotional well-being in the near future, with new smart-sensing products like Spire, for one, proposing high-tech help for keeping a lid on stress.

Earlier this month, Sentio Solutions also debuted a prototype of its emotion-trackerFeel, aimed to let users monitor their ongoing emotional states and to make recommendations for managing them. Demonstrating one aspect of wearable tech’s capaticity to really get us, dedicated FitBit user Koby Soto even put his wearable to use as an ad-hoc heartbreak meter recently, Buzzfeed reported; using the fitness tracker’s daily heart rate data, he traced the arc of a stinging breakup and was able to share his pain in graph form with sympathetic Twitter and Hacker News readers. Soto told the site,

I feel like it’s nice to have a log of your confirmation of what you felt. You can tell people you have heartbreak and you feel bad … People become less cynical once you show them the numbers or once you show the data or graphs. Everyone understands heartbreak, right? Everyone’s felt it. When you have this, it’s interesting — you have something to show.

Screen shot of Koby’s tracked heartbreak (Courtesy Koby Soto via Twitter).

Highly precise emotion-trackers might still need some time to mature; in the mean time, however, biometrics experts are also leveraging the technology to help couples and individuals develop much closer relationships with their bodies in the realm of sexual health. The makers of the kegel-tracking and -training gadget Elvie, for example, have been working to promote all-around and sexual fitness with their women’s wearable, while Lioness‘ upcoming pleasure-monitoring personal devices will pay particular attention to strengthening users’ stats between the sheets.

Given that many of us already use social media to express moments of joy and anguish, then (sometimes with rather infuriating vagueness), we might not have long to wait ’til those ex-lovers we’ve wronged start tagging us in posts about their relationship grievances–ones with hard data behind them.