Can This Smart Water Bottle Really Make You Drink More Water?

If someone was constantly reminding you to drink more water, would you do it?

Hidrate Spark is a smart water bottle built to track your water consumption and do exactly that. I used Hidrate for a month to see if it would make me drink more water, and here's what happened.

Let me start by saying that generally, I don't drink anywhere near the amount of water I should. I take sips from a bottle at my desk throughout the day when I remember to, but I frequently get so concentrated on projects that drinking water is the last thing on my mind. At home, I keep a refillable bottle on my nightstand in hopes it'll get me to drink more water, but once it's empty I usually get too lazy to fill it again, and I wind up drinking a juice or soda instead. Safe to say my habits aren't great.

 

Setting Targets

I've heard again and again that people should drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water per day, which doesn't make a ton of sense considering how widely people vary. Hidrate addresses this with personalized goals, syncing with an app on your phone to help you monitor your progress.

Hidrate takes a lot of variables into account to calculate your daily goals. In addition to considering things including your weight, height, gender and age, it syncs up with your health apps to gauge daily activity and factors in temperature, humidity and elevation to compute how much water you should drink for the day. In my month of using Hidrate, this goal has been as low as 36 ounces—I barely left home that day—and as high as 61 ounces.

I appreciate that Hidrate understands that different people have different Hidration needs depending on the day. While it can be slightly annoying to come back from a long walk on a sunny day to see that your activity has steeply raised your goal for the day, that's exactly the point. I just need to drink more water!

Keeping Up With Your Goals

Once you set Hidrate up with your wakeup and sleep times, it generates a ring-shaped chart that measures how much water you've consumed for the day. As you drink more water, blue dots fill the chart clockwise until you've reached your goal, and a set of glowing white dots shows you where you need to be to keep up with that goal for the day.

(via Hidrate)

But you don't want to keep the app open all day, constantly checking to see if you're reaching your targets. Hidrate aims to counter distraction from drinking water with notifications. Not only does it occasionally send push notifications to your phone if you're not keeping up, but it also glows throughout the day as a reminder to take a drink. That's why, when I set up my notifications, I selected the most eye-catching light options, featuring 10 glows and a combination of colored lights.

This glow function probably should keep me on track most days, but I somehow keep managing to miss these alerts. I think it's half to do with the bright fluorescent office lighting where I spend most of my day, and half that I get so caught up with work.

When I take the bottle home at night, the dimmed lighting makes this much easier, but by then I've often fallen quite short of my daily goal. Don't be like me and try to make up for lost time by catching up in a span of minutes, because you'll be left with an upset tummy. Take it slow and you'll definitely reach that goal before bedtime.

It also helps that the bottle is sizable, carrying 24 ounces when it's full. If you don't love refilling your bottle over and over throughout the day, this will make things easier on you.

The lazy girl in me did appreciate that you don't have to charge the bottle. Gadgets that need daily charging are a pain, but Hidrate Spark runs on a long-lasting battery that only needs to be replaced every few months.

By the way, reaching your goal activates a multi-colored light show in the bottle. It's a joy to see, and it's a nice incentive to drink your water.

(via Hidrate)

Just Add Water

One main issue I've had with the Hidrate bottle (and this is my fault entirely) is that I forget to take it everywhere with me. Even when I'm on target to meet my goals, leaving the bottle at work (especially over a weekend) ruined my watery ambitions. Few things are more disappointing than the Hidrate app sending me a notification with a cute pun about drinking more water when the bottle is miles away.

The app does have a feature to counter this. It allows you to manually add water to your count. You can quickly add water in eight, 12 or 17-ounce increments, and a slider lets you add between 0.1 and 24 ounces as well.

(via Hidrate)

Again, not being able to keep up with the goals, even when I can manually add water, is due to laziness on my part. I'm also terrible at estimating the volume of liquids, so I feel like I'm cheating by adding more water. How much water fits in the clear plastic water cups you get at restaurants? How about my varying sizes of drinking glasses at home? Not willing to guess, I usually let my goal fall.

 

 

Overall, while I haven't been consistently reaching my goals every day, I still feel like Hidrate has gotten me to drink tons of water and be mindful of it, too. I plan to continue using it every day to drink more and more water and improve my habits.

(My month of March via Hidrate)

If you're looking to track and improve your own water intake, I highly recommend getting your own Hidrate Spark if the $54.95 price point isn't too steep for your budget. If you're like me and benefit from having someone (or something) nagging you to reach your goals, it'll definitely put you on the right path.

 

Looking for a lower-tech way to drink more water, more easily? Click HERE to learn about the Que Bottle.