Olive is a wearable device designed to help you manage your stress. Find out how Olive works today in our review.
What is Olive?
Olive is a stress management device that launched on Indiegogo back in 2015. The wrist-based wearable promised to help you manage your stress using a simple system. You could monitor symptoms of stress and recognize where you feel most stressed.
Olive was created by a company called Olive Labs. After launching on Indiegogo, Olive Labs quickly blew past its $100,000 funding target. A total of $181,484 USD was raised by nearly 1500 backers. However, despite the successful fundraising, Olive announced that their fundraising initiative wasn’t successful and they later shut down Olive Labs.
Backers of Olive received an email in May/June 2015 regarding the refund process.
Nevertheless, Olive was a unique and innovative product. Let’s take a brief look at how it planned to help you manage stress.
How Does Olive Work?
Olive is a wrist-based device that helps you manage your stress. The wearable analyzes your patterns and biological indicators to get real-time information about your stress. Then, it connects to your phone to get location and calendar data.
Some of the things Olive tracks include:
- Changes in heart rate
- Reactions in your skin
- Trends in skin temperature
- Physical activity
- Sleep activity
- Exposure to light
Olive also promises to understand your stress over time. It learns more about when you feel stressed, and recommends stress management techniques based on that information.
How Does Olive Help You Manage Stress?
Olive discreetly nudges you through gentle taps (haptic feedback, or vibrations) and LED lights on your wrist. The device comes alive when it detects elevated stress levels. Once it gets your attention, Olive suggests simple solutions to reverse the negative effects of stress.
You swipe across the device to launch an exercise. If you’re feeling fine, then you can swipe the other way to ignore the information.
Some of the calming techniques could include breathing exercises, physical exercise, or massaging vibrations on your wrist.
Olive didn’t just invent these calming techniques: the company worked with physicians, researchers, and psychologists to come up with effective stress management techniques.
You can use Olive with or without a smartphone. It works better when attached to a smartphone, but you can use just the bracelet in standalone mode.
The Olive App
The Olive software is designed to understand your lifestyle and learn more about it over time. The Olive app provides little steps to reduce stressors in your life, and helps you create the skills you need to conquer stress when it negatives affects you.
To help understand more about you, the Olive app will connect with your calendar, location, and other available data. This data is combined with Olive’s own metrics to update its algorithms, which means Olive gets smarter over time.
The longer you use Olive, the better it will understand you.
Olive Tech Specs
- Modular design with swappable straps
- Aluminum and thermoplastic construction
- Optical pulse sensor
- Skin conductance sensor
- Skin temperature sensor
- Ambient light sensor
- 3 axis accelerometer
- Capacitive touch surface
- LED matrix display
- Haptic feedback
- Li-Po battery (estimated 4 day battery life)
- Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy
Olive Pricing
Olive is priced at $129 USD.
The final retail price is $169. Estimated shipping was for November 2015 – but as mentioned above, Olive Labs ceased operations in May 2015.
Who’s Behind Olive?
Olive was created by CEO Hiro Ellis, COO Hardy Simes, Industrial Designer Alejandra Castelao, Product Lead Pat Brandon, Brand Strategist Corey Hall, and Software Developer Ron Rosenman.
Olive Labs was based in New York. The company developed Olive throughout 2014 and launched their Kickstarter in early 2015. By May 2015, the company announced it was ceasing operations because they “have been unable to secure the funding needed to turn this vision into a sustainable business.” The Indiegogo project raised $181,000 of the company’s fixed $100,000 goal – so it’s unclear why the company ran into problems.
Conclusion
Olive was an ambitious project designed to help you combat stress using the power of a wearable device. Unfortunately for stressed people everywhere, the company ceased operations in May 2015, just a few months before the device’s estimated release date.
Nevertheless, Olive’s failure tells us one important thing: there’s clearly a market for stress management wearables. The device nearly doubled its fundraising target on Indiegogo. Watch for another stress management wearable to launch in the future.
