Health thingy thing review

This is not really a watch, it is one of those devices that supposedly monitor your fitness. To refer to the Sacosding device I will call it a watchy.

Its face is not really that greenish cloudy thing you see in the picture - this is just one of many preset face options that come with its app, and you can use your own pics (though how those work with the time functions I do not know).

Let's talk about the app first. To get started you install an app on your phone, designed for smart watches. Which this is not. In other words, the app has many functions which the watchy fails to support, such as connecting to social media, or controlling the camera of your phone. Minus all of those, the app collects health data from the watchy, and you need it to do stuff such as changing the face of watchy, or setting some personal parameters (weight, sex, etc), which are probably used to calibrate the health monitoring instruments of watchy. One of the limited non-health functions it can do is call your phone, so if you tend to mis-lay your phone...

So, what kind of health monitoring does watchy do? It promises to measure:

• blood pressure

• blood glucose

• blood oxygen level (at night only)

• temperature

• sleep

• steps

• heart rate

• ecg

How well does it do those measurements?

The real killer app would be blood glucose measurement, because for a diabetic that involves poking yourself n times a day into your fingers with some sharp needle, and transferring a blood drop onto some strip which then a machine measures [and this can go wrong in numerous ways if you are new to this, as I am]. If instead you can just press a button on watchy and it tells you that measurement that would be fantastic. No blood, no hassle, no bags of lancets, no cartons with measurement strips, etc. Thing is: this is not fantastic, it is fantasy. No measurement watchy has taken is anywhere near any of the measurement I made via pricking my skin. TBH I knew this was a long shot, because some research into the state of the art before even buying this device showed that "we cannot do that, and probably won't in a while".

OK, what about the other functions?

Well, apparently blood pressure is a work of fiction too. Slightly closer to real data (I do own proper blood pressure managment gear), but too far off to replace the real thing. Which is disappointing, because there are phone apps measuring blood pressure, and presumably more accurately.

Does it measure anything right? Well, temperature may be ok, and heart rate actually is pretty accurate.

Regarding the ECG function, watchy comes with additional gear so that you can strap it around your body, and place a couple of electrodes at strategic places. I haven't tried it, but because it measures the pulse fine, I would not dismiss that function out of hand.

How about watchy as a watch? Well, synchronising with the app synchronises the time anyway, but it works without that. It supports standard digital watch functions, such as stopwatch, and countdown timer. Originally, watchy came on a metal bracelet which I immediately ditched for the supplied rubber strap.

Sizewise it is rather clunky with its specced 44mm case diameter and 12mm thickness, considering that I measured it larger as 45.6 and 14.6. The discrepancy in the first measurement depends a bit on where you measure, but the right-hand side of watchy is occupied with 2 buttons and an electrode and 44mm might be the small bits in between; for thickness, on the back, there is a bit of metal sitting on your skin for the measurements and that raises the overall height AFAIC. As a consequence, this is actually too uncomfortable to wear at night.

Power reserve is not too bad, it lasts nearly a week between full charges.

There are some problems with the design. For example, whether you like it or not, one screen always shows you the weather. Unless the phone is not near or the app is not running, in which case you get the weather screen minus the weather. And going through the various options with screen swipery on watchy is an absolute pain.

Can I recommend this? Hell, no. The ECG function may have some potential, so if you have a need for this particular function you could give this a try, otherwise just no.