by 
Citizen, the wristwatch maker, partnered with IBM and NASA Ames Research to make their own smartwatch that doesn’t use Google’s WearOS. Instead of working with third party apps, Citizen focused on helping the wearer understand and anticipate patterns of fatigue and alertness, and strategies to maximize the wearer’s daily potential.
Citizen makes WearOS watches. They’re fine implementations of Citizen cases with WearOS inside. What’s really interesting is the decision to make a new OS, rather than go with Google’s.
For this, Citizen worked with IBM and the IBM Cloud with IBM Watson. Between that and NASA Ames Research, the watch tries to make you more aware of your personal fatigue. Here’s what they say about it:
The CZ Smart YouQ application provides insights that help make the wearer smarter about their own wellness, syncs with their daily life, and provides real-time biofeedback. Using neural networks developed within the IBM Watson® Studio workspace, CZ Smart YouQ can learn and understand the wearer’s chronotype (an individual’s preferred timing of sleep and wake) within seven to ten days by processing their sleep data and Alert Scores and deepens that understanding over time. 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 CZ Smart YouQ Alert Monitor was designed based on NASA’s PVT+ test and utilizing research from leading science and academic experts at NASA’s Ames Research Center Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory. The Alert Monitor tests are brief, gamified, and can be taken daily to measure the wearer’s alertness.
The screen images are designed to look something like a chronograph, and bridge the gap between traditional watch and smart watch, while allowing the wearer to really understand fatigue and recovery rather than trying to push through it.
The latest generation of CZ Smart watches with the proprietary CZ Smart YouQ application will be available in the U.S. at www.citizenwatch.com starting in March 2023.
