The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2023–2024
EQL BAND swaps green light for sound so smartwatches hear every heartbeat equally
FCB Health New York built a smartwatch band that senses heartbeats with sound, fixing green-light sensors that read darker skin less accurately.
EQL BAND
What it had to solve
Green light technology in smartwatches is less accurate for people with darker skin tones, yet by 2025 nearly 50% of clinical trials will rely on smartwatch data for treatment choices. Inaccurate data leaves people of color behind, and today's data shapes tomorrow's treatments.
How it works
EQL BAND starts from a measurement problem rather than an awareness problem: green light technology in smartwatches is less accurate for people with darker skin tones, yet by 2025 nearly 50% of clinical trials will rely on smartwatch data that shapes treatment choices. If the readings are biased, people of color are quietly left out of the medicine being built on that data.
FCB Health New York's answer was to change the sensing technology instead of campaigning about the bias. EQL BAND is described as the world's first smartwatch band to use sound smart technology, hearing all heartbeats equally regardless of skin tone.
The D&AD credits frame it as an agency build: FCB Health New York appears as entrant, advertising agency and design agency, with Studio RX, an IPG Health company, as production company. The argument is compressed into the product - today's data shapes tomorrow's treatments, so the device must be equal before its data is trusted.
The source page records no trial or sales figures. What it documents is a concept that turned an equity critique into an engineering answer, and the work is kept in the D&AD Awards archive.
Why it lands
- It moved the argument from awareness to mechanism: instead of asking researchers to distrust biased data, it removed the bias from the sensor itself.
- Sound-based sensing does not depend on how light interacts with skin, so accuracy no longer varies with skin tone.
- Tying the fix to clinical trials' growing reliance on smartwatch data made the inequity concrete and urgent rather than hypothetical.
- Building a physical band made the answer tangible and testable - a product, not a policy demand.
What it did
The D&AD entry records no trial or sales figures; the effect is the reframe it achieved. A health-data inequity usually addressed with campaigns became a hardware fix, and the concept is kept in the D&AD Awards archive.
What you can take
When a measurement technology is biased against a group, the fix belongs in the instrument, not the message: redesign the sensor so the data itself is equal.
Since then
EQL BAND entered the D&AD Awards archive as a health-data concept whose subject is the instrument itself. Because the claim lives in the product - a band that hears heartbeats equally on any skin tone - the work keeps arguing after the announcement: any smartwatch maker adopting sound-based sensing inherits the fix. The source page records no clinical results, so the case rests on the design logic: when the data is unequal, change how it is measured.
Sources
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