Fitbit Sense

» see fitbit.com/sense as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the sense sat in a strange middle. it was too expensive to be an impulse buy and too consumer-branded to feel like a medical device. i was aware of it the way an engineer is aware of most sensor-heavy consumer hardware: interested in the bill of materials, not the purchase. by 2020 i was 36, running a garmin at that point for a brief window of trying to jog, then giving up and going back to a phone in the pocket. the sense's pitch was not aimed at that habit.

the first sense shipped on 25 september 2020 at $329.95, well above the versa's price bracket. the differentiator was the sensor stack. an fda-cleared ecg app for spot checks on atrial fibrillation, plus an eda sensor that read electrodermal activity through the palm as a stress proxy. overnight skin temperature tracking and spo2 blood-oxygen trending rounded out the medical-adjacent claims. an aluminum body and an amoled always-on display, with the versa's silicone strap and body language kept for continuity.

sense 2 followed on 23 september 2022 with a thinner case and a physical side button back (the haptic pad on sense 1 had annoyed reviewers). the eda sensor gained a continuous background scan mode instead of only running during finger-hold sessions. google had already closed the fitbit acquisition by then and was pushing fitbit accounts toward google sign-in. the pixel watch had launched the month before, in august 2022, at a price close to the sense 2's.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

the sense was the first mainstream consumer smartwatch to package the electrodermal-activity sensor for stress reading. the eda story was where the marketing pushed hardest. you held two fingers to the metal frame for a couple of minutes and got a stress score, then the app walked you through a guided breathing session. it was a real reading of a real signal, just one that most people did not know what to do with once they had it.

the fda ecg clearance in september 2020 put fitbit in the same feature checkbox as apple watch series 4 and later, which had launched ecg in 2018. the sense arrived two years behind apple on that flagship medical feature and never really overtook the perception that ecg on wrist was an apple thing you also had elsewhere.

~ the day it died ~

in august 2024 google's pixel wearables product management team confirmed to the press that the pixel watch was the future of the fitbit smartwatch story. sense 2 and versa 4 would keep selling until inventory ran out, no formal shutdown date, no bricking. no sense 3 or sense 4 would ship. any new sensor investment was going into pixel watch hardware, and the fitbit brand was being narrowed back to trackers.

the eda and ecg sensor tech in the sense line did migrate up to the pixel watch 3, which shipped that same month at $349 with a similar sensor stack under a google casing. so the ip did not die. the brand died and the ip changed jackets. a familiar pattern for anything google has acquired.

~ the long tail ~

the sense will be remembered by two audiences: the people who liked its stress-tracking pitch enough to build a routine around it, and the biosignal-hardware community that noted how a mainstream device could ship an eda sensor at consumer pricing. the software that made the sensors legible now lives inside the fitbit app running on pixel watches. the specific brand of watch that first paired that stack with a $329 sticker is done.

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