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Advanced hydration monitoring: the Geca Watch 2.0 and the nRF5340
06
May
2026
2026
Oslo, Norway
By leveraging Nordic’s Bluetooth® LE SoC, Hydrostasis’ Geca™ Watch 2.0 lets you know when you need water before you get thirsty
“Better hydration habits” are crucial for staying healthy. This is the core principle driving Hydrostasis, Inc., a California-based, “human-centric” medtech wearable company. It provides actionable, customizable hydration information through their wireless Geca Watch 2.0 to achieve positive impact on safety, performance, and health.
“We believe hydration is a vital sign and should be available everywhere heart rate and pulse oximetry (monitors) are, such as in the clinic, at your local pharmacy, in your smart device,” explains Debbie Chen, PhD, Founder and CEO at Hydrostasis. “Our goal is to provide that missing information for people to take action toward being well-hydrated and increase longevity and quality of life.”
She further explains, “Older adults are a particular focus because 10 million seniors are hospitalized for preventable dehydration in the U.S. annually. The risks of dehydration increase with age due to a degraded sense of thirst, and its effects (such as an increased risk of falling, impaired kidney health, and accelerated dementia) are more pronounced.”
While their primary customer base is adults aged 40+ with hydration-specific needs, Chen adds that Hydrostasis’ products and services also generate strong interest from elite athletes, busy professionals, frequent travelers, construction workers, and individuals with disabilities.”
Meet the Geca™ Watch (2.0)
“We have so much knowledge about nutrition, yet we don’t know how much water we should drink and when,” explains Chen.
Chen and her team invested seven years in R&D to launch the GECA™ Watch in 2024. The following year, they launched the GECA™ Watch 2.0, which uses the nRF5340 System-on-Chip (SoC) from Nordic Semiconductor – an all-in-one, dual-core Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE) SoC.
The GECA™ Watch is a real-time, personalized wearable hydration monitor. It is one of the first and only commercially available wrist-worn devices that uses optical sensors to detect hydration levels in your skin, providing alerts to drink water before dehydration symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, or brain fog begin. It provides real-time alerts and mobile-enabled progress tracking once calibrated to the user.
Our collaboration with Nordic has been amazing….we’re excited to continue to work with the Nordic team as we develop new features and products in the future
Debbie Chen, Founder and CEO, Hydrostasis
Why Nordic
“Nordic was our first choice,” explains Chen.
The first version of the GECA™ Watch used the nRF52832 System-on-Chip from Nordic Semiconductor - a general-purpose multiprotocol SoC supporting Bluetooth LE.
According to her, they required a component with ample memory, strong processing capability, and hardware-level security to protect their intellectual property.
For the GECA™ Watch 2.0, these requirements hadn’t changed. Citing a need for an upgraded MCU (microcontroller unit), Chen explains, “The specific features we required were sizable memory capacity, significant computing power, and the ability to isolate and protect IP through hardware security features”.
For this, they went with Nordic’s nRF5340. Cited as the “world’s first wireless SoC with two Arm® Cortex®-M33 processors”, it offers the memory capacity, computing performance, and hardware-level security needed to support the GECA™ Watch 2.0. Additionally, it supports an extensive range of wireless protocols, including Bluetooth LE.
As a dual-core SoC, the nRF5340 comes with an application core with a 128/64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 application processor with 1 MB Flash & 512 KB RAM, and a network core with a 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 network processor with 256 KB Flash & 64 KB RAM.
With this dual-core, the network core can handle wireless protocols independently while the application core manages user logic. This separation helps maintain the SoC’s ultra-low-power consumption and efficient protocol handling – ideal for the GECA™ Watch 2.0.
The nRF5340 SoC also offers advanced security through hardware-enforced security features, including Arm TrustZone for secure/non-secure execution separation, readback protection through AP-Protect, and the CryptoCell 312 subsystem for secure key storage and cryptographic protection. These capabilities ensure that sensitive code and proprietary models can run in protected memory regions, significantly reducing the risk of extraction or reverse engineering.
Together, these features make the nRF5340 not only a performance fit for the wearables’ real-time hydration monitoring needs, but also a secure foundation for safeguarding Hydrostasis’ core IP.
Another selling point was the ease of upgrading. Chen cited the “familiarity with the ecosystem and ability to maximize code reuse” as reasons the nRF5340 was the logical successor to the nRF52832.
Moving Forward
Since launching last year and being a feature at Nordic’s booth at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026, the GECA™ Watch 2.0 has sold out twice. As Hydrostasis moves forward in quality assurance and streamlined iteration, it will continue to benefit from Nordic’s SoCs.
“Our collaboration with Nordic has been amazing,” exclaims Chen. “From fans and customers first, to being highlighted at the Nordic booth at CES 2026, we’re excited to continue to work with the Nordic team as we develop new features and products in the future.”
