Sit Up Straight with Prana
With all the fitness wearables on the market, it’s hard to not keep track of your steps, calories, sleep, and activities. However, we spend about 6 hours a day sitting, on average. That’s a quarter of our day that we don’t track what we’re doing and how our bodies are performing. Prana is here to change that.
Prana is a wearable that tracks your breathing and posture to ensure you’re being the best you can be, physically, throughout the day. The creators of Prana believe that by tracking this you can improve and therefore breathe better, sit better, and live better.
As you can see, Prana is the activity tracker for after your activities. Co-founder Andre Persidsky explains that sitting can have a large impact on our posture and breathing and, in turn, breathing can effect our stress, energy, blood pressure, concentration, and even our mood. So, why not take small steps to improve posture and breathing in order to gain massive benefits?
Prana works very simply. The small disc, equipped with a clip, is fastened to your waistband and has multiple accelerometers and advanced algorithms. Communicating with a dedicated app via Bluetooth low energy, Prana tracks diaphragmatic breathing and posture. It does this by being placed in a single location and gathering data from the multiple accelerometers. It can recognise when you’re sitting versus when you’re standing and also when walking. It tracks ten distinct breathing patterns to record your progress.
But, why does all this data matter? Well, the app, for both Android and iOS, organises this data and alerts you when you need to sit up straighter, take in a deep breath, or take a few steps to recuperate. If your breathing or posture deteriorates you get alerted with a text from the app telling you to re-focus. The advantage of having a text sent rather than an app notification is that we’re less likely to ignore it and more likely to improve.
Additionally, the app doubles as your breathing and posture coach. There are number of 2-minute training sessions to choose from to improve yourself. You simply inhale and exhale to collect points to play these games. The main goal is to develop a better baseline for yourself and to teach you tricks for breathing more effectively.
As expected, something you wear all day should be small. Coming in at just 1.25” in diameter and only .25” thick, Prana is discreet enough to go unnoticed. It also has a 7-day battery life which gives you some peace of mind.
While it seems unlikely, sitting time can still contribute to your overall wellness. Prana allows you to take control of this “down time,” because, as the creators say, we spend nearly 100% of our lives breathing.
Prana is only available for pre-order via your email address and the launch date is yet to be announced.
