What’s the next big thing for health gadgets? Smartwatches and fitness bands are everywhere. Smart rings had their breakout year in 2024 and look to have another strong one in 2025. Smart scales are the norm, and high-tech ways to check your blood pressure are commonplace, too. What comes next?
At CES 2025, I had the opportunity to see what it may be. During a behind-closed-doors demo session, Amazfit showed me the new Amazfit V1tal — a small device that records you while you eat so it can automatically log your food and provide nutritional info. It’s a bit of a mad concept, but after seeing the gadget for myself and hearing Amazfit’s pitch for it, I think it could be huge.
What exactly is the Amazfit V1tal?
The Amazfit V1tal is unlike any other health gadget I’ve seen before. When you sit down to eat, you press a button on the V1tal to open the top portion, with motors automatically flipping the screen away from you and revealing the camera. You set the V1tal on the table, ensure the camera has a view of your plate, press the record button, and then eat like usual. When you’re done with your meal, stop the recording on the V1tal — that’s all there is to it.
What happens next is the fun part. The V1tal takes the recording of you eating, analyzes it, and sends it to Amazfit’s Zepp app (the same one used to control Amazfit’s watches like the Amazfit Active 2). Once there, it’s logged in the app as a meal you ate that day, including a breakdown of how many calories it was and the macro values — including carbs, protein, and fats. It’s similar to logging food with an app like MyFitnessPal or Lifesum, but instead of having to scan barcodes or manually enter all of the ingredients in a meal you had, the V1tal gets all of that information from the recording.
What’s particularly interesting is that the V1tal also looks at your eating behavior. For example, it’ll see if you sat down with a burger and a salad but barely touched your greens. It’ll also detect if you’re rushing through your meal and eating too quickly. When it sees these things, it’ll let you know next to the logged meal with insights and tips on how to improve in the future.
Food logging and tracking isn’t anything new; plenty of mobile apps have offered the functionality for years. And while those apps can be really helpful, remembering to manually log everything you ate is a time-consuming and easily forgettable task. The Amazfit V1tal should solve that problem. Prop it up on the table, eat your meal, stop recording, and just like that, you’ve logged your meal.
The other exciting part is how the V1tal will eventually tie into the rest of the Amazfit ecosystem. Amazfit has ample smartwatches and fitness trackers in its portfolio, and it’s easy to imagine how the V1tal could be another helpful puzzle piece.
Talking with Scott Shepley (Amazfit’s Head of Global Marketing) and Jonathan Johnson (Amazfit’s Head of North American Marketing), they offered an example of someone training for a marathon. You could get your activity and sleep data from an Amazfit watch and your nutritional data from the V1tal, and Amazfit could use both pools to offer better training or nutritional information.
Amazfit wants the V1tal to do more
Where things get even more interesting (and a little concerning) is how Amazfit wants the V1tal to go beyond food recording and logging. The V1tal runs Amazfit’s Zepp OS — the same software on its smartwatches — and that means you get some smartwatch-like functionality. The V1tal can show notifications from your phone, set timers, manage a to-do list, and more. You can also use the camera for regular video recording if you’d like.
At one point, Shepley and Johnson referenced the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 and how they want the Amazfit V1tal to be a better version of them. The main focus of the V1tal right now is to track and log your food, but Amazfit has big ambitions for the V1tal to be much more than that. One example that was given was having the V1tal on your desk and using your voice to ask it to open Amazon and buy something for you.
It was encouraging to hear Shepley and Johnson talk about these grand visions for the V1tal, but this is also where it gives me some pause. To me, the pitch of a dedicated health device focused on helping you log your meals and improve your nutrition is unique and interesting. Comparatively, another all-in-one AI gadget that’s competing with two of 2024’s biggest tech blunders is something I’d want to stay far away from.
I raised these concerns to Shepley and Johnson, who both seemed to understand the balancing act in front of them — providing a device with a focused intent while offering extra functionality for people who want it. So long as the V1tal focuses on being a nutritional device first and offering extra features second, I think it’ll be fine. We’ll just need to see if that’s what actually happens.
A glimpse at the health gadget future
Thankfully, you shouldn’t have long to wait for that. Though it’s just a prototype right now, Amazfit plans to launch the V1tal in Q1 or Q2 of this year. Unlike many concept and prototype announcements at CES, you’ll be able to buy and use the V1tal in the very near future.
I’m sure there will be some apprehension about a device watching you while you eat. Still, it’s easy to see this being an incredibly useful gadget for so many people — whether you’re trying to lose weight, bulk up, track your macros, or get better insight into your eating behavior. The Amazfit V1tal could be instrumental in all of those scenarios, and it’s charting a new path of health gadgets unlike any we’ve seen before.
Amazfit’s pitch for V1tal is impressive. The next step is seeing how it performs in the real world and if it can deliver what Amazfit is promising — and I certainly hope it does.
