Bellabeat Leaf is a wearable fitness tracker that can predict stress and can, therefore, enable you to avoid it. But what makes it different from traditional smart fitness trackers is that it is made for women and not only monitors sleep and activity but also keeps track of the user’s menstrual cycle or pregnancy.
It will then take all of the relevant information together and predict potential stressful situations. Women who wear the Bellabeat Leaf will not only know when they are most likely to be stressed, but they will also have access to guided meditation and breathing exercises to help fight stress.
Fitness trackers are meant to be worn at all times for it to monitor as much of your activities as possible. And thanks to the Bellabeat Leaf’s beautiful design, you would not mind wearing it day in and day out.
Features of Bellabeat Leaf
These are the Bellabeat Leaf’s features and capabilities:
- Wide Range of Designs
There are several designs that you could choose from when you buy the Bellabeat Leaf. There is the Leaf Urban Silver Edition, which is made of durable and water-resistant wood with a silver stainless steel geometric leaf design that makes it stand out.
It also comes in rose gold and gray rose editions. Then there is the Leaf Nature series, which features a more traditional and symmetrical leaf design in silver, dark silver, or rose gold set in wood. All Bellabeat Leaf trackers come with a double wrap bracelet, a necklace, and a tool that can help you replace the batteries easily.
More than being able to choose the right color and design, you also have a variety of ways to wear your Leaf: as a necklace pendant, as a bracelet, or clipped on your clothes. - Activity Monitoring
Bellabeat Leaf can tell you how many steps you have taken, how many calories you have burned, and how much distance you have traveled. It can also track how long you did a certain exercise on top of logging your active times. You can also manually add an activity. - Sleep Quality Monitoring
The Bellabeat Leaf monitors sleep duration and quality, as well as the time you went to sleep and woke up. It also allows you to manually add a nap. - Meditation Tracker
The Bellabeat Leaf can also record how long your meditation sessions take and can even guide you through these meditations. - Menstrual Period Tracker
The Bellabeat app will keep track of your menstrual cycle and tell you when you are fertile or ovulating. It can also remind you to take your birth control pill and even track your pregnancy if you are pregnant. - Anti-stress Monitoring
The Bellabeat Leaf can help you predict which times or situations would bring too much stress and it can help you avoid these. It will take data from your activities, sleep quality, and meditation, as well as the impact of having your period or being pregnant and then calculate your sensitivity to stress. - Goal Setting
The Bellabeat Leaf mobile app allows you to set personal goals with all factors that it measures: activity, sleep, and meditation. You can now know if you’re achieving your 10,000-steps-per-day goal, if you are sleeping eight hours every night, or if you are meditating enough. The mobile app will show you your progress. This way, you could walk more or sleep more if you are falling short of your goals. - Social Media Sharing
You can share your progress and how you have been achieving your goals with your friends online with a simple click of a button.
The mobile Bellabeat Leaf Mobile App
One of the most important components of Bellabeat Leaf is the mobile app. You need the mobile app on your smartphone to see your fitness and sleep data as the Leaf itself does not have a screen. The mobile app is well-designed and, like the Leaf, it is also beautiful. You can sync your Leaf and your app just by tapping the two devices together so that your information gets updated.
After synchronizing the app and your Leaf, you can find updated information on your activities, sleep and breathing. You can course through each set of information by tapping on the relevant bar.
What You Would Like About the Bellabeat Leaf?
Women’s bodies are different from men’s. The Bellabeat Leaf understands this and incorporates both menstrual cycles and pregnancy into the data it gets. In short, the Bellabeat Leaf is much more suited for women than other fitness trackers, such as Fitbit. It is prettier too. Even if other fitness trackers have feminine colors, their form factor still makes them odd-looking.
For instance, try wearing a Fitbit with a flowing sundress or corporate attire and it just doesn’t seem to fit perfectly. The Leaf, on the other hand, can be worn on your neck or your wrist, or it can be clipped onto your shirt collar. Thus, it does not really clash with your outfit. You can probably wear it on your wedding day.
Moreover, the Bellabeat Leaf helps you avoid stress and can give you guided meditation and breathing exercises. You can choose breathing exercises for beginners, and move your way up to advanced exercises. With the guided meditation feature, you can choose to meditate for confidence, more energy, inner peace, deep sleep, focus, or less menstrual discomfort.
And if you are feeling extra stressed, you can get guided SOS meditation as well.
The Leaf is also very comfortable. Even with all the hardware on the Leaf, it weighs only 0.64 ounces or 0.04 pounds. Yes, it is as light as a jelly bean or a penny physically cut in half. It’s also small in size, measuring only 1.89 x 1.18 inches.
What Could Be Better?
The Bellabeat Leaf is a fitness tracker that is made to look like jewelry. It does not have a display that would help you check up on your activity statistics anytime. You need to always have your smartphone with you to see your progress or to see the latest information registered.
It also does not monitor your heart rate. This might be because the Bellabeat Leaf can be worn in different ways, making it difficult to get an accurate heart rate as there is no guarantee that sensors would be touching areas where they can get a pulse.
Too bad because knowing the heart rate can help you know just how intense your exercise is, rather than just counting steps like what pedometers do. Also, the heart rate information can help you automatically select what type of guided meditation you should do. Furthermore, it can also help make the stress avoidance feature more accurate.
What’s more, the Bellabeat Leaf might have an app with all the right features and a thoughtful and intuitive layout, but it cannot sync with your Leaf on its own. This means that you will need to sync your Leaf with your smartphone to get the latest data. Not exactly a deal breaker, but an update that will allow for automatic synchronization of data might be nice.
Further, another downside for the Bellabeat app is the lack of a historical view. You can only see information for the day itself and a simplified week view, but beyond that, you would not be able to see your data anymore.
Lastly, one of the biggest weaknesses of the Bellabeat Leaf is the accuracy of its measurements. The Leaf itself may be very accurate in counting steps or monitoring your breathing, but how you wear it might affect the readings. For instance, wearing it on your wrist would result in more steps being recorded because the tracker also counts the natural arm movements of your arm.
It would have been better if you can adjust the sensitivity of the sensors in the Leaf. This way, if you wear it on your wrist, it will not record the natural movements of your hands as an activity or a step even when you are just sitting down.
When you use it to monitor the length and quality of your sleep, you would need to keep it close to your body, like clipping it to your PJs, so that it could automatically detect if you are going to sleep or not. Even so, that is not a guarantee that it will automatically kick in the sleep counters when you are already snoring.
Thankfully, you can correct this by manually inputting both the time you went to sleep and woke up.
When doing the breathing exercises, the Leaf needs to be resting against your stomach to get accurate counts on your breathing.
All in all, you would need to experiment and test to see where you should wear the Bellabeat Leaf for it to give you accurate counts. Without another fitness tracker on hand, however, this type of experimentation might not be possible
My Final Recommendation
The Bellabeat Leaf is a capable fitness tracker that is geared towards women. It is a pretty piece of jewelry that can help you keep fit, get enough sleep, avoid stress, and relax more. On top of the data that it collects, it also uses information about your menstrual cycle or pregnancy to adjust its estimates.
However, you do need to temper your expectations with Bellabeat Leaf. For one, it comes with a mobile app that might not be as informative as the mobile apps coming from other fitness trackers such as Fitbit. In fact, it may not be as accurate as Fitbit.
However, the Bellabeat Leaf does its job well. It helps you become more aware of your activities, it tells you to sleep when you lack it, and it even tells you to relax when it thinks that things are going to be stressful for you. It can also teach you how to relax.
The Bellabeat Leaf is also reasonably priced, with the device selling for as low as $119 (For the latest prices and discounts, check here). Some models may be a little bit more expensive but are still below $200 (For the latest prices and discounts, check here).
Check out how Bellabeat compares to Fitbit here
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