Dubbed the ‘Smarter Watch’, the CZ Smart doesn’t track you through the day… it anticipates your day in advance.
Watchmaking pioneer CITIZEN just revealed its latest offering at CES this year – the CZ Smart watch + the YouQ app, designed in partnership with IBM Watson and NASA Ames Research Center. While looking just like any premium watch, the next-gen CZ Smart’s true functionality is unlocked when combined with the YouQ app that gathers, parses, and learns from the data provided by the smartwatch. The watch comes in a variety of styles, sporting CITIZEN’s iconic design with a rotating bezel, a crown and two pushers sitting beside the circular display, and the ability to swap between leather, silicone, mesh, and link variants.
Designer: CITIZEN
“The latest CZ Smart watch is a game-changing product that brings CITIZEN’s legacy of watchmaking together with best-in-class research and technology of NASA and IBM, directly to wearers’ wrists,” said Jeffrey Cohen, President at CITIZEN Watch America. “Coupled with the proprietary CZ Smart YouQ application, this smartwatch is a revolution in wearable wellness.”
The unisex watch comes with a metal body made from 316L stainless steel. Now in its second-gen (the first gen was released back in 2020), the watch also comes with the YouQ app that uses machine learning to constantly learn more and more about you so the longer you wear the watch, the more personalized its experience gets. The smartwatch sports a 1.28″ AMOLED display that offers high visibility in any time of the day, and the battery lasts for 24 hours on a full charge. The watch also comes with a built-in gyroscope, altimeter, barometer, accelerometer, heart rate sensor, SP02, and an ambient light sensor. It runs the Wear OS by Google, but is interoperable with both Android and iOS devices.
The CZ Smart YouQ app is perhaps the most impressive bit of tech here. Developed in partnership with IBM and NASA, the YouQ app possesses the ability to crunch data in ways that other smartwatches can’t. While smartwatches just present diagnostic data like your heart rate, sleep quality, fitness, weather, etc, the YouQ goes into prognosis, actively predicting and giving you actionable insights. It studies your sleep patterns and tells you when to sleep to get the best quality rest, tracks your behavior and provides key insights to help you stay more focused and less fatigued, and lets you generate Alert Scores to test your mental acuity. Alert Scores are generated when a wearer takes a custom-designed Alert Monitor test, a consumer-facing iteration of NASA’s Psychomotor Vigilance Task Test (PVT+), originally developed to determine the mental acuity of astronauts.
The Citizen CZ Smart 2nd gen watches will be available starting March 2023 on CITIZEN’s website with a price range of $350 – $435. The proprietary YouQ application will be available at the same time, although it’s only designed to work with the 2nd gen CZ Smart range of watches, and a hybrid series that will launch at a later date.
