tracker

Garmin Venu Sq review: A solid fitness tracker without the frills

By Diana J. Smith 1 month ago
garmin-venu-sq-3

Lexy Savvides/CNET

The $200 (£179, AU$300) Garmin Venu Sq has almost every fitness- and health-tracking feature you could want in a smartwatch for less than competitors like the Apple Watch ($399 at Apple) and Fitbit Versa 3. It has a bright LCD touchscreen, built-in GPS, SpO2 (blood oxygen) tracking and up to six days of battery life, which makes it a compelling buy, especially if you want a watch that’s compatible with both Android and iOS. 

It’s not the most premium-looking smartwatch out there and it misses out on features like a voice assistant and altimeter, but it makes up for it in health and fitness features that elevate it from the rest. 

Like

  • Excellent fitness tracking
  • Continuous blood oxygen monitoring
  • Up to six-day battery life
  • Strong sleep tracking

Don’t Like

  • GPS signal is slow to lock
  • Vibration motor is weak
  • Music version costs $50 more

A

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Hands on: Can a fertility tracker give you useful health tracking too?

By Diana J. Smith 2 months ago

Early in the pandemic, researchers started experimenting with fitness and health trackers as a way to detect COVID-19, ideally before patients noticed any symptoms, by looking at measurements like sleep levels, skin temperature, breathing rate, resting heart rate and heart rate variability (how much the heart rate changes over time in response to biophysical stress).

The US Army’s Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium worked with multiple projects including Fitbit, the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency partnered with Garmin and Oura, and the NBA bought more than 1,000 Oura rings in the summer to help basketball players track their health risk. 

And when Ava, whose fertility tracker bracelet is already a licenced medical product, started actively looking for researchers, the government of Lichtenstein enrolled 2,000 people in the ongoing COVI-GAPP study to see if the sleep, skin temperature, pulse rate, skin perfusion, breathing rate and heart rate variability ratio that the

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