Podcast 139: Introducing the WHOOP 4.0

The WHOOP 4.0 is here.

Will Ahmed welcomes WHOOP Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer John Capodilupo to the WHOOP Podcast to discuss everything you need to know about WHOOP 4.0, how it was made, and how it will help improve your performance. Will and John discuss all the new features with the 4.0, including WHOOP Body featuring Any-Wear Technology, SpO2 and skin temperature measuring, the new Health Monitor, and the updated Sleep Planner with haptic alerts. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.  

WHOOP 4.0 Podcast Show Notes

0:26 - A New Era of WHOOP. “This is truly an exciting day in the history of WHOOP,” Will says. “We [have] announced our biggest, most ambitious technology release in WHOOP history, WHOOP 4.0, and all the technology and software and apparel to go with it.” 2:54 - WHOOP Body. “WHOOP Body featuring Anywhere Technology is truly a revolution for the wearable industry. I think it goes back to something [Will has] always said, that wearable technology should be cool or disappear,” John says. “With WHOOP you can dress it up or now with [4.0] you can truly make it disappear by embedding it into some of our smart garments.” 3:45 - A New Way to Wear WHOOP. “What we found actually in some of the research we've been developing for a long time, is that sometimes by putting [WHOOP] on your bicep, you can get even better accuracy depending on the activities you're doing. So we took that idea and started looking at what other locations around the body could you put a WHOOP sensor. We've mapped out 10 to 20 different locations [where WHOOP can be worn.]” 6:21 - SpO2. WHOOP will now track your SpO2 levels with the 4.0. “Sp02, also known as blood oxygen, is very important because it gives you an idea of how much oxygen your blood is carrying. Normally humans will be 95-100% oxygenated. … There's tremendous health monitoring implications. With the COVID pandemic, we saw a lot of people buying pulse-oximeters because we know COVID wreaked havoc on your blood oxygen levels.” 7:50 - Daily SpO2 Monitoring. “If you walk into a doctor's office for an annual checkup, the first thing they do is stick a pulse oximeter on your finger, or to get your pulse-ox and to get your resting heart rate. Now WHOOP is effectively going to be able to measure those things 24/7,” Will says. 8:52 - Skin Temperature. The WHOOP 4.0 will also track your skin temperature. “We have a thermometer on the WHOOP strap that's measuring the surface of your skin and how warm it is. The interesting thing is the fluctuations you see, especially while you're sleeping or at night, can be really important to monitor wellness or illness status,” John says, while adding that this will help WHOOP further understand female physiology and performance. 10:46 - Health Monitor. “We said to ourselves, ‘We need to have a way to alert people in the WHOOP app that something's awry. And so now the Health Monitor within the WHOOP app is going to tell you if your resting heart rate is out of whack, your heart rate variability is out of whack, your respiratory rate. SpO2, you want to be above 94 percent, It'll alert you for that. It'll also keep an eye on skin temperature.” 13:02 - Smart Alarm. “This will give people the ability to programmatically set a sleep goal and using Sleep Planner … and then the WHOOP strap will silently start vibrating at the appropriate time and wake you up.” The new WHOOP Sleep Planner and smart alarm has 3 modes: Wake up at an exact time, wake up when you meet your sleep goal, or wake up when your body is in the green. 15:57 - Downsizing. The WHOOP 4.0 is 33 percent smaller than the WHOOP 3.0. 18:58 - New Battery. The battery inside the WHOOP 4.0 is groundbreaking silicon anode technology that has never before been used commercially. 20:45 - Waterproof Battery Pack. The WHOOP 4.0 is waterproof, and now the WHOOP battery pack is too. “We went back to the drawing board and said ’How do we make this water tight?’ And the big thing we couldn't get around was how do you charge the WHOOP 4.0 If you need some contacts to pass electricity through to charge the battery? And so what we did was use another groundbreaking technology, wireless charging.” 25:55 - Improved Signal Quality, Improved Accuracy. “With the WHOOP strap, it all boils down to how accurately can we monitor your body? And so that we spend an enormous amount of time and resources trying to understand how we can make our sensor even more accurate. … We actually built around 90 different sensor configurations and different prototype WHOOP straps looking at how different LEDs and photodiodes could affect the signal to noise ratio,” John says. “We have more LEDs. We have three green LEDs compared to two on the [previous WHOOP]. We also have a red and infrared light to give us SpO2, but these extra lights also come with four photodiodes compared to the one photodiode on [WHOOP 3.0].” 31:19 - When to Expect Your WHOOP 4.0. The 4.0 will begin shipping the week of September 27th. “It’s coming out the door. It’s manufacturing as we speak,” Will says. “If you are an existing member, you're first in line. Go to the WHOOP app, sign up. If you have over six months of membership, we send it to you for free.” 32:02 - WHOOP Pro. Learn more about the newest membership option.