Amazfit Helio Strap

I have never seriously considered an Apple Watch. Not because it is bad (it is probably very good) but because I wear watches, actual watches, and I am not going to replace one with a notification screen strapped to my wrist. For me, a watch is a deliberate, considered object. The Apple Watch is a phone accessory you wear on your body, and those are two different things.

So the question for me was never Apple Watch versus anything else. It was how to track health data without disturbing the watch I actually want to wear.

The answer I found first was Whoop. I came across it early, before it had become the thing every professional athlete and podcast host was promoting, and I immediately loved the idea. A screenless fitness band, worn on the wrist, that tracks your heart rate variability, sleep quality, recovery, and strain continuously. No notifications. No display. Just sensors, running quietly all day and all night, giving you a picture of what is actually happening inside your body. For someone who already wears a watch and has no interest in a smartwatch, the concept was perfect.

And then I saw the pricing model and lost interest immediately.

The Whoop problem

Whoop charges a monthly subscription to access your own data. The hardware is either free or discounted depending on the membership tier, which sounds generous until you realise what that actually means: the moment you stop paying, you lose access to everything the device has been collecting about you. Your data, your sleep trends, your recovery patterns, your HRV history, held behind a paywall with a recurring monthly bill attached to it. For a product built entirely around the idea of understanding your own body, this struck me as a genuinely strange proposition. I am not against paying for things that deserve payment.

I am against paying a subscription to see data that my own body generated.

I sat on the idea for a while, convinced there had to be an alternative that did the same thing on better terms.

The Amazfit Helio Strap is that alternative.

It tracks what matters: heart rate, HRV, sleep stages, blood oxygen, stress, readiness, recovery. The data is detailed, continuous, and completely yours. No subscription. No paywall sitting between you and your own physiological information. You pay for the device once and the data is accessible in full from day one, indefinitely.

What the data becomes in ten years

But here is the thing I think about that nobody else seems to be talking about: the value of this data is not what it is today. It is what it will be in ten years.

Right now, the most useful thing my fitness data can do for me is tell me whether I recovered well enough to train hard today, or whether my sleep was poor. That is useful. It is not transformative. The correlations you can draw from a few months of tracking are limited, because health is complicated and individual variation is enormous.

What changes that is AI, and AI is advancing faster than most people are accounting for.

We are still early in the era of AI applied to personal health data. The models that exist today can draw some inferences from health metrics, but they are largely trained on population-level studies with relatively coarse data. What they cannot yet do meaningfully is take five years of your continuous personal physiological data and derive genuinely personalised insights from it. Not because the AI lacks capability in the abstract, but because almost nobody has five years of continuous personal data to give it.

I will. Every day I wear the Helio Strap is a day of longitudinal data that cannot be recovered, because you cannot retroactively collect yesterday's data. The sleep from three years ago, the HRV from the winter I was most stressed, the resting heart rate trend across a full year of training: these things will not exist unless I collect them now. And when the models that can actually do something meaningful with this kind of data arrive, the people who benefit most will be the ones who were collecting long before it was obvious why.

This is, I admit, a long bet. It requires believing that AI applied to personal health data will become genuinely powerful, which I do believe, and that the data collected on a consumer fitness tracker will be useful to those models, which seems likely given the resolution and continuity of what the Helio Strap captures.

In the meantime, the day-to-day usefulness is real. And the data is mine, not a subscription away from disappearing.

Whoop had the right idea. They just decided to charge you monthly to access the results of it. The Amazfit Helio Strap is what I wanted Whoop to be: the concept, without the ongoing fee, sitting quietly on my wrist next to the watch I actually chose to wear.

Either that, or I am the kind of person who gets excited about spreadsheets of my own heartbeat. Both things may be true.