The market for smart armbands has been the most successful segment of the wearables market to-date, making it an appealing sector for new players. But does the market need yet another smart armband?

Olive is trying to bring stress management to the smart armband segment with a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo currently sitting on $170,000 (at the the time of writing).

The armband is described as “a stylish, intelligent wearable band that helps you conquer stress.”

As armband magnets which promise magic stress relief properties are so yesterday, the company states that “Olive analyzes your patterns and biological indicators…[monitoring] the complexity of your stress behind the scenes to help you build awareness of your body’s stress response.”

The emphasis is mine, but if you’re stressed wouldn’t you know you’re stressed?

It goes on:

Olive understands your stress over time and provides you with simple solutions that can have a huge impact on the quality of your life.

And how does it do so?

Olive discreetly nudges you through gentle taps (haptic feedback) or LED lights on your wrist when it detects elevated stress levels. Olive suggests simple solutions to reverse the negative effects of stress…If you need help, it’s as easy as a swipe to launch an exercise. If you’re feeling fine, swipe the other way to ignore it.

In laymans terms: when you’re stressed the band buzzes and flashes lights…and then suggests you do something to relieve your stress (whether vocally, via your phone, or secret squirrel flashing light codes isn’t made clear).

Then, because you’ve become even more stressed due to your expensive Olive armband flashing lights and buzzing away on your arm, you have to swipe it to make it stop.

Scenario: you’re doing a pitch to clients for a multi-million dollar contract. You’re naturally stressed because your company needs the work.

The Olive wonder band: BZZZZZZZZ BZZZZZZZ (complete with flashing lights).

It gets better: the company believes that when this occurs you should stop and do exercises to relieve your stress, because you know the best way to deal with stress isn’t to end the stressful situation but to delay it, take a few deep breaths, and then continue on.

All good pseudo-scientific ideas should come with recommendations from professionals as well:

We worked with physicians, researchers, and psychologists to come up with short exercises that help you build your ability to handle daily stress effectively.

When you get home from a hard day of stressful work, complete with your Olive band buzzing away, flashing lights at you, and demanding attention more regularly than a 3 month old puppy, you can use the app to analyse your day in stress!

No, don’t put your feet up, grab a drink, and relax: hop on your iOS or Android device and get stressed about how stressed you were at work.

Solution looking for a problem?

The Olive appears to be a solution looking for a problem, but even if there may be some value to monitoring stress levels during the day (without flashing lights and buzzing armbands,) there’s another flaw to the idea: it could be easily replicated using a cheap sports armband and a decent application that takes the data and does something similar to what Olive is offering.

The Olive will sell at $149 a unit with a shipping date of November 2015.