Geeksphone Is Getting Into Wearables — With A Sex Tracker

Spanish smartphone maker Geeksphone, perhaps best know for its partnership with Silent Circle over the pro-privacy Android fork Blackphone, is expanding from handsets into fitness wearables.

The company has today teased a forthcoming fitness tracker bracelet (its first such device), called GeeksMe, which will have a circular, monochrome OLED display with 12 bi-color LEDS around it.

Geeksphone tells TechCrunch the tracker is currently in development and it’s hoping to launch it before the Spanish summer holidays — aka by the end of June, beginning of July.

Along with the usual fitness tracker feature-set of step counter, calories burned and distance, it will also do sleep monitoring, and expand incoming smartphone message/call notifications to the wrist. Plus you get alarms and reminders, so will be able to set custom activity reminders (for instance). So far so relatively standard wearable.

However GeeksMe will also include two less commonly found features in what is a very crowded space: namely “ecological footprint” tracking, for the environmentally conscious. And, well, for the performance anxious, a sex tracker. Yep: quantifying your sex life is apparently a desirable thing.

Now, as we noticed back in 2013, existing fitness trackers can be used to garner data on sexual activity (via keeping tabs on factors such as heart rate and skin perspiration, and cross referencing those with the lack of any steps taken). But GeeksMe won’t be tracking your under-the-sheets activities with the help of any especially fancy sensors.

Rather the sex tracker mode will apparently require manual activation by the user each time you want it to track your bed-based action. (You’ll presumably have to hope your partner doesn’t mind you pausing to switch your wearable into “lover performance” mode. Not a mood kill at all… )

“It’s not based on heart rate. But it will have a special mode (similar to sleep mode) that once it’s activated will measure things like number of times a day/week, duration, calories burned, and other very useful information based on different algorithms we are developing,” says Geeksphone’s Ángel Sánchez Díaz, who is director of innovation for the GeeksMe project. “It will help users to have a healthier lifestyle, monitoring different values and statistics when practicing sex.”

The eco-tracking mode will make use of GPS location (via a Bluetooth linked smartphone, as there is no GPS on board the bracelet) and daily fitness activity with additional info that is added manually by the user such as recycling, food and water consumption. Presumably there will be some sort of score kept to encourage users to gamify reducing their environmental impact.

There’s no word on price for the wearable at this point but Sánchez Díaz says Geeksphone intends to undercut the wristbands of “the Top-10 brands in the market”.

The design of the device has also not yet been finalized but Geeksphone is emphasizing fashion as another priority for its first wearable — which will arrive in the market in the wake of Apple’s also fashion-focused (and long trailed) Apple Watch, which is due to ship in April.

Apple’s smartwatch has the best chance of kindling mass market interest in wearables which have remained of relatively niche interest thus far. So expect scores more small fish to try their hand with wearables once the Apple Watch lands.