This hydration-tracking cup will remind you to drink enough water

We have tech accessories to measure our weight, our exercise, our sleep patterns, and our diets. But there’s still one aspect of healthy living that hasn’t yet been brought into the cloud: hydration.

Drinking enough water, it turns out, is really important. That means more than just drinking when you’re thirsty – by that point, you’ve already missed an opportunity to sip something before your body’s “I need to drink now” impulse kicks in.

One Hong Kong-based startup has devised a gadget to bring hydration into the age of high-tech fitness tracking: and it looks just like a normal water bottle.

A cup with benefits

The Ozmo Smart Cup doesn’t look particularly techy – there isn’t a touchscreen anywhere on it, nor a flashy logo. If it were heaped together with a bunch of other water bottles and coffee mugs, it would barely stand out.

The difference is what’s on the inside – aside from the coffee or water, of course. Ozmo features sensors that track a drinker’s coffee or water consumption, and syncs that info to a smartphone via Bluetooth. Ozmo’s app can notify a user if they have gone too long without a drink, and can even track their caffeine intake.

There are two Ozmo models – the ozmoActive tracks only water and has a sportier appearance, while the ozmoJava+ tracks both coffee and water. The biggest difference between the two devices is that the coffee model also includes a recharging base that doubles as a heater, keeping your cuppa joe at optimal temperature.

Ozmo waltzed through its Kickstarter goal late last year, and is currently on display at CES in Las Vegas. Much of the company’s pitch is aimed towards the health conscious – it says that monitoring hydration can be a big issue for the elderly and those prone to kidney stones – but it’s also a perfectly good device for the techy in general. (I, for example, do not work out often enough to really warrant having a fitness band, but wear one anyways to monitor my meagre physical activity because it’s kind of fun.)

Ozmo’s app monitors a user’s daily hydration and caffeine levels, and also allows the user to enter in other drinks they’ve had, to complete the profile. It can also produce hydration or caffeination reports to chart your daily, monthly, and annual activity. The app currently syncs with Apple Health, and there is an Android version in the works. The company says that battery should last about 3 weeks.

This is an eighty dollar cup. It’s a cup. For eighty dollars.

The biggest glitch that may harm Ozmo’s adoption is the price: US$80. This is an eighty dollar cup. It’s a cup. For eighty dollars.

If you have kidney stones and are particularly in tune to your hydration levels, then that’s probably worth it. If you find your mouth tasting like a dusty closet each day, then maybe you need some hydration reminders.