Citizen's Latest Smartwatch Packs NASA And IBM AI Tech Into A Stylish Wearable

At CES 2023, famed timepiece maker Citizen launched its newest CZ Smart, which is a smartwatch that has a built-in self-care advisor, developed together with NASA and IBM's Watson.

Not a company most consumers relate to when it comes to Wear OS, let alone smartwatches, Citizen has launched their latest 2023 version of the CZ Smart, the "Smarter Smartwatch". With its proprietary CZ Smart YouQ app, the watch claims to help "the wearer understand and anticipate patterns of fatigue and alertness and offers customized insights and personalized strategies to build better habits to maximize a wearer's daily potential."

Between the marketing jargon surrounding the real-time wellness capabilities of the app, the YouQ app ultimately tries to anticipate the wearer's peak strength and alertness drops are in a well-built, good looking, albeit large frame. Citizen says that leveraging algorithm developed by IBM Watson and NASA's Psychomotor Vigilance Task Test, the watch can learn the user's chronotype (i.e. preferred sleep and wake times), therefore defining Alert Scores, as well as patterns of maximum strength or fatigue. The algorithm apparently also deepens its understanding over time.


The CZ Smart comes in two flavors—Casual (41mm) and Sport (44mm) models. They look like properly built Citizen watches with high-grade stainless steel, but only a proper hands-on will tell, with a selection of colors and strap materials. Both share identical specs, down even to the 24+ hour battery life; the wider diameter 44mm version only affects the bezel, it seems. The display is a 1.28-inch AMOLED, 416 x 416 (326 ppi) unit. Under the hood is a Snapdragon Wear 4100+ with 8GB RAM and 1GB storage. There are your usual HR, SPO2 sensors for health tracking, but no sign of body composition or skin temperature sensors that should be standard in 2023. (Come to think of it, the internals and specs almost look like copies of a Fossil Gen 6.)
In case you're wondering, the Citizen CZ Smart runs the latest Wear OS 3.0, and is pre-loaded with YouQ, Strava, Spotify, YouTube Music, Google Fit, and Amazon Alexa. Google Assistant is not available, which is standard fare for non-Pixel, non-Samsung smartwatches.

The watches will be available in the US starting in March, with prices ranging from $350-$435 for the Casual and $375-$435 for the Sport.