Why the Hottest New Wearables Want to Be Ignored

There’s a new kind of gadget on shelves, designed for you to ignore it 99 percent of the time—it only needs attention when its battery is low. I'm talking about the screen-free wearable . You rarely look at it or touch it, yet it collects health stats day and night so you can view them later on in an app, when you get the time—if you can find the time. No pressure.

They have been exploding of late and are only set to grab more attention in the coming months, with the promise of demanding less of your attention once you actually buy one. Today there’s the Garmin Cirqa, Google Fitbit Air , Polar Loop, the Amazfit Helio Strap, and the Whoop series , the original pioneer of this category. Apple is considering its own version of the concept, according to Bloomberg . One answer to that big question of why? Many of us are sick of attention-hoarding tech and social media, not least realizing it is probably doing us no good .

I have reviewed wearables since they went mainstream the first time around with the early waves of Fitbits from 2009 and onward. In some ways this new generation of trackers feels like a callback to those days. Back when I used the Fitbit Ultra , a 2011 tracker that clipped to your jeans, I paid so little attention to it that two days passed before I realized I’d lost it somewhere on the streets of Zagreb, Croatia. While, like many, I fell for the sub-Tamagotchi little cartoon faces of the 2012 Fitbit Zip’s screen , it—like a Fitbit Air —wasn't something you were meant to pay attention to more than a couple times a day, max.

Over the last few years, though, I’ve spent most days referring to a Garmin, Samsung, Fitbit, Coros—the list goes on—dozens or hundreds of times a day. WhatsApp messages and emails buzz on their little screens and my wrist reflexively raises to see what’s up . When I wear a Garmin watch, I’m also lulled into the rhythm of checking evening and morning “reports,” and pathologically looking at my sleep score as soon as I wake up. And let’s not even get into the move alerts, an eye-rolling nag wearables have had for years now.

Part of the sell-in of new-breed wearables is that they're, in some ways, the antithesis of what other watches have grown into. Fitness watches are more smartwatch-like than ever. OLED screens are near-ubiquitous even in health trackers; hardcore running wearables let you communicate with AI assistants. And this is all even though smartwatches have never really fulfilled the original promise of a life-changing app or feature beyond what people used the first Apple Watch for back in 2015: not much.

Sure, Apple Watches may have saved a life or two , but that’s not necessarily what you’re buying them for. I waited years to report on smartwatch apps that would change things and instead saw entire wearable app ecosystems wither like neglected houseplants. Screen-free wearables want to hit “reset” on the entire category.