BrilliantHouse Smart Fitness Tracker with Health Monitors

I am very pleased with this purchase. The charge lasts a long time. The only thing is u wish it was waterproof so I could wear for water aerobics. Very easy to set up in phone. Lightweight amd comfortable. I like being able to change the bacd color to match outfits. Great argin.

My primary ‘need’ for this device was to replace my pedometer. Based on a couple of days of parallel testing, I don’t think it’s accurate enough for that. I do like a few things about it though. Here’s a breakdown of it’s features:

step counter:

it is not very accurate, it seems to count about one in every three or four steps I take around the house compared to my iGANK pedometer (available on amazon for about the same price as this ‘watch’). I previously compared this pedometer to an original fitbit and a Garmin vivofit 2. In that test, with all devices placed in my pocket, the fitbit was probably the most accurate and the iGank seemed to over report steps by 17-20%. This device records about 30-40% of the steps as the pedometer. I found it is most accurate for prolonged walks with the arm wearing the ‘watch’ freely swinging with each step. In those cases, it was closer to 50% of the pedometer in steps counted.

So, if you’re looking for an accurate step counter, look elsewhere, this isn’t it.

blood pressure monitor:

I have an OMRON BP652 wrist cuff and a greater goods BD3439 bp monitor. Both appear to be more accurate than this device but this device is in the ballpark. I’ve used my bp monitors in Dr’s offices to compare to their readings and they are very close to their readings. This device seems to come in close. Example, I just measured with this device and my bp showed: 129/84, the wrist cuff showed: 125/76

I’m not really sure how it guesses my bp since it doesn’t have a cuff that puffs up and puts pressure on your veins but… its close so I can’t complain. I like that it seems to monitor this throughout the day and night and you can view a good history of your pb readings in the app.

Heart rate: this seems like a pretty simple reading so I would expect it to be pretty good. My blood pressure cuff’s mentioned above track this when taking a bp reading so a comparison from my above bp test was my cuff read: 90 and this device was at 85 (this was several minutes after the bp test so it is possible my heart rate dropped in that time).

blood oxygen: I have no idea how it would know this without sampling my blood (no bleeding was experienced using this device) but it measures it constantly throughout the day and provides this data for you… although I suspect it’s made up.

blood sugar: same deal as blood oxygen… whatever.

temperature: on the device, it says ‘skin temperature’ but it seems to be what you’d expect your body temperature to be. I have a VICSAINTECK forehead thermometer and an infrared thermometer gun to compare readings to.

this device: 98.2
forehead thermometer: 98.9
infrared gun: 87.6 when pointed at my wrist, 92.6 when pointed at my forehead

I’m guessing this device reads my skin temp and adds a value to it to come up with something that should be close to what your body temp is. It’s not close to my actual skin temp so I’m not sure why it says ‘skin temp’ on the device (it only says ‘temperature’ in the app).

So it uses some voodoo to come up with the reading but it seems to be near accurate.

Battery –

I’ve used it about a day and a half and the battery is down about 20% from a full charge. I’m not sure it will last the 15 days the manual says it should last but time will tell. I will update this review if I get results that differ greatly from the manual’s expectations.

sleep tracking:

the manual makes it clear that this will not work if you sleep during hours other than typical nighttime sleeping. I tend to go to bed late (between 11pm and midnight) and it seems to be fairly accurate with when I start sleeping (it has assumed I was in bed about 30-60 minutes before I was actually in bed). it also seems to take a while in the morning to figure out I’m up (for example, I was up around 8:15am this morning and it was registering sleep for the next couple of hours for me, light sleep mixed with ‘wide awake’ times on its graph in the app. It seems this would benefit from allowing the user to tell the device when you go to bed and get out of bed rather than trying to guess it. Maybe a future firmware update will address it but this seems like the type of device that never gets an update so assume it is what it is now.

The app

I use this on a small android tablet and my biggest complaint is that when in landscape mode (how I normally view my tablet), it jumbles all the text overwriting on itself and if I really want to make sense of it, I have to unplug it, and turn it portrait.

You can set up notifications which is nice so if my tablet receives an email, the device will vibrate and I’ll see a quick flash of the email subject on the display. it also can display notifications from your phone, messages app, twitter, facebook and facebook messenger. you can also configure it to nag you to drink water from time to time, remind you to get up and walk, and set step, calories, and distance goals.

another interesting feature is you can go into a ‘remote control photograph’ part of the app where it will bring up it’s own photo app and will take a picture when you shake your device. I found the amount of shake you needed to make it snap the photo was a bit much and would probably result in strained facial expressions.

the app also has dozens of faces you can choose from, I chose one that showed the current time, day, date, step count, and most recent heart rate and Kcals (not really sure what this is, probably its estimation of what you’ve burned based on the highly inaccurate steps recorded).

There are more features like configuring workouts which I haven’t explored yet.

Overall, I like the device but have dinged my grading based on the inaccuracy of the main feature (for me), step counting.

I honestly wasn’t expecting much out of this watch. Any smart watch that you can get for $20 probably isn’t going to be that great.

As everyone else has been saying, most of the readings on the watch are very inaccurate. I was really just looking for something to tell time & count steps. After running 3 miles on a treadmill, but the watch only registering that I went around half that distance, I figured “well at least it tells the time”.

About a week after buying the watch, I’m out and somebody asks the time. I look at my watch and respond. Someone else responds it’s 3 minutes earlier than the time I gave. My 1st instinct was to think they were wrong, but after comparing to my phone, I realize that within a week of syncing the time, the watch has already become 3 minutes fast and needed to be synced again. A watch that fails to even tell time correctly is useless.

Putting all of that aside, the ui on the watch is horrible. There are 10 different screens to display different measurements (all of which are inaccurate) and can only be advanced forward. If you accidentally tap the watch an extra time (such as when you turn your wrist towards you and because of the delay, you aren’t sure if the feature to wake the watch activated or not, so you tap it as its in the process of waking), it requires an additional 10 taps just to try to see what you originally meant to. The app doesn’t even allow you to remove any items from this excessively long cycle.