 Hi, my name is Dave for alexfurgus and alexfurgus.com and today I'm bringing you a product overview and product review of the BioStrap. Now the BioStrap is a wrist worn biometric and activity tracking device, kind of similar to the Aura Ring or some of the new Fitbit models that are on the market. It'll track your heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation and respiration rates. It'll give you a recovery slash readiness score in the morning as well as track your sleep. So in this review, let's do an up close look at the device itself and what comes in the packaging, then take a look at the app and then come back here for some pros and cons on whether or not the BioStrap might be a device that you should consider to track your workouts and biometrics on a daily basis. Okay, so this is what you get when you buy just the biometric set and not the set with the shoe pod. It comes in this cylinder here. You get a wristband, an induction charger, micro USB cable. So let's go ahead and open up the box and take a look at what's inside. So right on the top you're going to see your BioStrap and it's already going to be inside of the 2.0 brand band that has the texture on it and it has the newer clasp on it. Let me see here. I can get that open. It's got the peg style that fits into the little hole there and then you just tuck it under there like that. So let's put that off to the side and underneath that you get the two different colored wristbands that also come with it. The older style, you get a blue one and you also get a beige one and the beige one uses a different closing mechanism here. As you can see it has these two little chevron shaped things that fit into these little grooves on the back. So to change the band out, all you have to do is flip the BioStrap over itself and you just kind of pull like that and then the sensor module itself comes right on out like that. It's very simple and you can just put it into the other strap. Just fits it right down in there and you just kind of wiggle it in. Like I said, these straps are very soft and pliable so it doesn't take much to really get it in there. You also get the induction charger. It's a little disc like this with a micro USB here. There also is a micro USB cable in the package itself but I'm using it for something else right now. To charge the device you just plug the disc in to USB and you set the BioStrap down on top of it like that and it takes about 90 minutes to charge. The battery life is about two days, maybe two and a half days tops but like I said it only takes about 90 minutes, two hours to recharge so that's not too bad. Also in the package you do get a little bit of a little instruction manual but it's pretty basic because most of the instructions are covered through the frequently asked questions inside the app. So with that done, let's go ahead and take a look at the BioStrap app itself and then we'll finish up with some final thoughts and pros and cons. Alright, here we are looking at the BioStrap app. Okay, so when you first open the app, here's your home screen. It's your dashboard and it's decided that it wants to sync with my strap. That's fine. So on the dashboard screen you can see the steps, the active calories, my resting heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing rate and oxygen saturation, activity, recovery and sleep are across the top. So my recovery score today is 66 and my sleep score is 93. I got a ridiculous number of hours there for sleep, hours and minutes. So I guess first things first, let's take a look at the steps. There you go, there's your graph there showing you when it detected steps, how many calories, duration and whatnot. Now you can also go and look at the weekly totals, the monthly totals and the yearly totals as well. Now yearly is basically just a combination of the last few months. So let's go back here and let's take a look at active calories. And it's kind of just like the steps there, we can go through the weeks, months, year and one thing to note too is that anytime you see this export button at the top you can export out a screenshot of whatever screen you're on inside the app which is pretty cool. So resting heart rate, let's take a look at that. Okay, so this is a little bit different kind of graph. It actually has data points instead of like a bar graph. So purple are overnight while you're sleeping and white are daytime readings. So you can see my highest, lowest baseline and average. And then you can double, you can pinch and pull and zoom in actually on these. So the bio strap overnight by default will take a biometric reading of your vitals every five minutes. That's what these purple dots are right there. And during the day it does by default every 10 minutes. So we can also look at the heart rate variability. Same kind of thing only with the heart rate variability. It also has that line there that's your recovery rate. And you can look at the week and then it gives you a little break down here of your average, right there you see that. And you see the desirable range and then you can take a look at your month. Now you can see I got a little bit low down there. I was actually undergoing an intestinal cleanse which kind of coincides, interestingly enough coincides with that. So that does make a lot of sense why my heart rate variability, my body was under a little bit more stress during those a few days there. That's kind of interesting actually. Okay, breathing rate and same kind of deal here. You can see all the data points and also with the oxygen saturation. Same kind of thing there. Okay, so that's your basic home screen with all of your different main biometric readings right there. So insights, click on that. And it gives you kind of an overview of how you stack up to all of the other BioStrap users. It also gives you at the top your positive influences on your data levels. So you can see early sleep onset increased my light sleep by 7.4%. And getting more active calories increased my light sleep by 2.5%. So scrolling on down, we get this nice radar chart. Now the white inside part, that is the average of the BioStrap user base. And the orange part around the outside is where I stack up. So and if you want to see the actual numbers on that for yourself, you can touch on each one of these. Let's see if I can get one to pop, there we go. So my value, seven hours and eight minutes of total sleep, population average, five hours, 34 minutes, my percentile, 88%. And you can do that on any one of these values. Okay, so let's go back to the dashboard. So the little person icon at the top left hand corner, that's if you wanted to share your data with somebody like a personal trainer or a coach, it's called remote monitoring. So let's go back to today. So that's it there, let's take a look at the activities. Okay, so here's my activity timeline. This is where you would find any entries for activities that you've recorded with the BioStrap. I mainly am using it for meditation right now. So if I was to do like yoga or weightlifting or running or elliptical, those would also show up here in this timeline as well. You would get to those by using the record function right here. So one of the nice things about the BioStrap is that the ability to do biometric reports. Now I can do a two minute scan or I can do a comprehensive pulse report and it'll actually email it to you. And you'll get like this PDF that has all of this data, basically your HR, HRV score, and also your low frequency and high frequency and which is your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. So if you really want to go down the rabbit hole with HRV data, you can use the biometric comprehensive pulse report and get a really good five minute read and a report sent to your email address. Now this is sleep lab here and if you want to, you can optionally sign up for the sleep lab subscription and that enables you to track snoring levels, leg movement and max biometrics which means every two minutes instead of every five minutes. Honestly, I have to say I'm a little bit unsold. I'm not really, well, I'm not sold on the snoring levels. Because what if your partner, if you share a bed, they snore? Or what if you have a dog in your room and it snores? How is the BioStrap supposed to know the difference? So I might not renew the sleep lab subscription. Now meditation plus, in fact, we're gonna take a look at that in a second here, that too is optional. And with that ads beyond just regular biometric tracking, is it gives you access to brain.fm, which is another separate app that's out there on the app store. It lets you use their meditation soundscape while it records your biometrics. And I'll show you here. So you trap on that and you can choose how long you want your meditation session to be. So let's just pick ten minutes and it'll start. And I don't know if you'll be able to hear this in the microphone or not, there you go. And so at any time, if you actually don't want to have that background music or background sounds, you can just hit the pause button. And so there you go. And then if you want to stop your session early, you can just hit the stop button. But yeah, see, it's too short of a session. Okay, that's fine. So, all right, let's take a look at settings here. Now in settings, you've got the battery percentage there on the upper left hand corner. You can manage remote monitoring, let's see here. So you can establish a connection with another Biostrap user to monitor their data. Yada, yada. Basically, you can request a connection to somebody else instead of giving somebody access. Okay, here's the exercise library. Now one of the things that the Biostrap allows you to do is it allows you to train your own custom exercises. So that's what the exercise libraries for. It's for a listing of the ones that you've recorded. So you can set up your daily goals as well. So mine is general muscle fitness, but you can do a couple of different ones there. Support, it's built into the app. So it's actually, it'll launch a chat window so that you can actually type like a text message and they'll get back to you the same way. That's kind of cool. I don't feel like opening that up because I don't think I want to submit a support question. Frequently asked questions. So there's a couple of different articles, troubleshooting, common questions, understanding the data and features, which I think is really nice because I think for a lot of people that get this device, it's great to have all the information, but if you don't know what the information is and how you can use it, it's going to be useless. So being able to understand the data is really important. So I'm glad to see that they've created a couple of articles about that. They've even got some videos here too. So if you click on the bio strap itself, it'll show you the battery percentage last time it synced. And this is where you can increase your biometric readings like that. And it'll take readings every five minutes instead of every 10 minutes. Okay. Okay. So you all also at the top, you can add a device like if you wanted to add a shoe pod, which I don't have, or you wanted to add a third party heart rate monitor like a polar chest strap, which is pretty cool. So if you've got a chest strap that you're already using, you can get the bio strap and use the chest strap for live biometric readings. So it'll actually read your heart rate in real time and add that data into the app itself. So I don't think I have any devices. So there we go. Now the other button at the top right hand corner is the market where you can subscribe for meditation plus and the sleep lab. Let's take a look at meditation plus because again, because I don't think I explain a little. So okay, so here's my activity timeline. And now using meditation plus, I recorded a couple of meditation sessions. So let's open up the most recent one here. So I get a Zen score. Now if you don't have meditation plus, you don't get the Zen score. It just tracks your biometrics like it like this down here. And you can see HRV and respiration rate. Also is this how are you feeling thing? Click on that. And you can say I felt pretty good that was calm and I was hungover not hungover, but you can add that in there as well, sort of like a journal entry. But these two factors right here with the heart rate and HRV my HRV went up, my heart rate went down and my respiration stay pretty close to average. See how you can do that? You can drag your finger across and see at any given point where all of their biometrics match up. So if you wanted to do another activity instead of meditate, you click the change here and you've got gym workout, auto detects cardio and weight training. And then you can do cycling, elliptical rowing, running. I mean, there's a ton of different activities. You can choose from to track your biometric readings. Now the ones that have the little padlock on them mean that you need to have the shoe pod for. All right, here we are back to the beginning. And I think that's just about covers the biostrap app itself. Oh, I didn't even take a look at the sleep. So let's take a look at sleep, which is pretty neat. Okay, there we go. So just like with the meditation, it'll out, it also has a some sleep survey here about how you felt. So I already did that today. But there's my sleep score in my contributing factors, total sleep, deep sleep, efficiency. Looks like my penalties, I had an elevated average heart rate. So that brought down my sleep score. All right. So here we're taking a look at the sleep stages. Now, one thing I've noticed is it only has awake, light and deep. I think it kind of bunches REM sleep in there with either light. I think I think light and REM are kind of the same. So yeah, I did wake up in the middle of the night a couple of times there. And then here are my biometric scores overnight. And then also down here, it shows disturbances because it does have an accelerometer in your in the, in the biostrap. So it looks like at around this one o'clock this morning, it looks like I had some disturbances and also you can edit your onset or wake up time in the event that it was wrong about when you actually fell asleep or woke up. I haven't had to do that because it does a really good job at auto, auto detecting. And then if you want to take a look at more than just today, you can also click on the week, month, year, let's take a look at the month, my average sleep score for the past month is 92. And it shows you your sleep stages and your movement trends. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. So you can see it does a really in depth job here with your sleep tracking. So back to the dashboard. So that is pretty much it for the biostrap. Okay, so we've taken a look at the biostrap up close and personal. We've seen what comes in the box and we've taken a look at the hardware. We've also looked at the application itself and seen how in depth the different biometric charts are and all the different types of data that it gathers. So let's go over a few pros and cons of this device to see if maybe it's something that you might want to look into. So as far as pros go, I like the price. I like that for about $159, $169, you get a pretty comprehensive suite of biometric gathering tools there. You get heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation, respiration rate. You get the ability to get a readiness slash recovery score in the morning to track your sleep. You also can use it when you're in the gym or doing yoga. You can use it while you're meditating. So it really does encompass a lot of different areas of a general wellness and fitness routine. And you can see all of the impacts that all of the different things that you're doing have on your body. So I think that for the price, it's a really good deal. I like the fact that you can also get just the biostrap itself or the shoe pod biostrap combo for more money. So you don't have to get the entire complete set to see if the biostrap is going to work for you. Another pro, I like the form factor. I like the soft rubber. I think it works well for me. That might be a con actually for some people. So let's see some other pros that I have with the biostrap. I like the fact that I can export my data out of the biostrap via either just screenshots or I can use the web utility, which they just announced. You can log in to your account on the biostrap website and download all of your biometric data as a .csv, which is like an Excel file or a JSON file. So that's pretty cool. Let's go over some cons because there are a few cons to this device. Now the first con is that it doesn't have an airplane mode. So the biostrap uses Bluetooth LE, which is low energy, but there isn't a way to turn it off. It's always transmitting Bluetooth always. So there isn't a way to turn it off. So for people that are concerned about EMF, electromagnetic frequencies, that might be a con for some people, that there isn't an airplane mode to turn it off overnight while you're sleeping. So you have to leave this thing on your body while it's communicating with your cell phone. Another con is the two-day battery life. Now I know that the Aura ring can last five to seven days between charges. The two-day charging thing every two days may be a con for some people, but it's still every two days. I'd like to see that improved in a future version of the biostrap. Let's see, another con. You do have to pay extra if you want increased frequency of biometric readings during your sleep sessions every two minutes instead of every five minutes. You do also have to pay extra if you want to get a Zen score during your meditation sessions. I'd like to see those things maybe rolled in and included in the actual app itself in future releases. So they're not necessary. You can use the biostrap as it is without any of those upgrades. They do add just that little bit more, but are they actually worth the extra couple of bucks a month? I don't know that the brain.fm ambient background sounds really add anything to a meditation session, especially if you already have your own music that you like to listen to. So would I recommend this product? Well, I don't like to give a hard yes or a hard no, but if you're somebody looking for the kind of detailed data that the ORA ring provides, it certainly is a little bit cheaper and it's also available today so you don't have to wait four weeks to get it, which is what attracted me to the biostrap. So if you want to read more about the biostrap and maybe get a little bit more detailed information about this product, make sure to check out Alex's website at alexfurgus.com where we're going to be having a detailed write up of the biostrap posted for you all to read. So once again, my name is Dave for alexandalexfurgus.com. I hope you have a wonderful afternoon, wonderful day wherever you are. So take care.