Screenless health bands: a growing market

These searches are one job: tracking sleep, recovery and heart rate around the clock without wearing a screen. A band with no display sits on the wrist or arm, and everything is read in a phone app. Whoop defined the form, and in the last year two big alternatives arrived: search Fitbit Air and Hume's Hume Band, now in its second version. People search them by name, as a sleep tracker band, and increasingly for a tracker that comes without a monthly subscription.

The anchor is Whoop, and its growth is measured: 450,000 searches a month, up 75% over the last twelve months against the twelve before and up 108% over two years. That rise is not only search's: Whoop's searches on Bing and its news coverage rose over the same year. The newcomers are large but young. Fitbit Air draws 135,000 searches a month and Hume Band 60,500, with Hume Band 2.0 at 14,800, but all three sit at the top of the search scale or on sparse series, so read them as direction only: launches drawing attention, not yet measured demand. Whoop fitness tracker (9,900 a month) jumped within a year after years level, an unconfirmed step, so its +483% is left aside.

The generic searches are small and rising. Wearable sleep tracker draws 1,600 a month and was up 1,820% over the last twelve months against the twelve before, while sleep tracker band and best sleep tracker without subscription each draw 390. Most members are past a spring high, with six-month changes from -33% (Whoop) to -73% (sleep tracker band), so this is a young category to read again next spring before calling its pace.

The buyers are athletes and health-minded adults who want data without notifications, and a growing share who resent paying Whoop's membership: that is the opening Hume and search took. Advertisers pay a median $2.33 a click and median keyword difficulty is 40 of 100, higher than most consumer niches here. A founder should look around the hardware rather than at it: honest comparisons between subscription and one-time bands, apps that read and explain exported data, coaching built on top of it, and straps and accessories for bands now selling at scale.