There’s a new kind of gadget on shelves, designed for you to ignore it 99 percent of the time—it only needs attention when its battery is low. I'm talking about the screen-free wearable. You rarely look at it or touch it, yet it collects health stats day and night so you can view them later on in an app, when you get the time—if you can find the time. No pressure.

They have been exploding of late and are only set to grab more attention in the coming months, with the promise of demanding less of your attention once you actually buy one. Today there’s the Garmin Cirqa, Google Fitbit Air, Polar Loop, the Amazfit Helio Strap, and the Whoop series, the original pioneer of this category. Apple is considering its own version of the concept, according to Bloomberg. One answer to that big question of why? Many of us are sick of attention-hoarding tech and social media, not least realizing it is probably doing us no good.

I have reviewed wearables since they went mainstream the first time around with the early waves of Fitbits from 2009 and onward. In some ways this new generation of trackers feels like a callback to those days. Back when I used the Fitbit Ultra , a 2011 tracker that clipped to your jeans, I paid so little attention to it that two days passed before I realized I’d lost it somewhere on the streets of Zagreb, Croatia.

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