Smith thinks that if enough buy a Wave bracelet, office buildings can turn down their heaters and air conditioners, saving companies millions in energy bills and easing demand for fossil fuels. No thoughts of female metabolism, nor adjustments for the rise of business casual.Īs a result, many of us are always complaining it’s either too warm or too cold at the office, and these people are Embr’s core market. I did feel a bit warmer, but in a chilly room I wasn’t that much more comfortable - certainly not enough to justify the $300 price.īut maybe I’m just not the Wave’s target audience, the people whom Shames calls, the “thermally underserved.” He told me that the now-familiar room temperature standard of 72 degrees Fahrenheit was established in the 1960s by testing men of average build, dressed in suits. And while the device got warmer or cooler on demand, it didn’t do much to heat up my fingers. It’s been a chilly April, good weather for testing. “I was surprised when I looked at the results,” Zhang said.Īlas, the Wave had almost no effect on me. After wearing the Wave bracelet for 30 minutes, she said the students reported a distinct improvement, roughly equivalent to a five-degree increase or decrease in room temperature. But then she tried it out on students at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is a researcher in “human thermal comfort.” The experiment put 49 students in rooms that were either too hot, or too cold. It sounds a bit like voodoo, especially since Smith said the Wave has no effect on people who are already comfortable. The Wave makes people feel cooler or warmer even though their body temperature hasn’t changed. Still, the effect isn’t dramatic, like walking into a sauna or a stand-up icebox. You adjust the setting by pressing one end of a temperature bar for warm, the other for cool. It’s this constant variation that helps make it effective, Shames said.
The Wave bracelet contains software that varies the effect, producing pulses of heat or cold that you feel on your wrist through the bottom of the device.
It’s the sudden surge of heat or cold that makes us feel better, even though our core temperature has hardly changed. Instead, the Wave is supposed to work like downing an icy beer in July or holding a steaming cup of coffee in January. But Sam Shames told me that’s not the goal. The Wave doesn’t generate nearly enough heat or cold to change a person’s core temperature.