Inside Jawbone’s Up3 Misstep

Jawbone founder and chief executive officer Hosain Rahman was dealt bad news in late summer of 2014. Early tests of his company’s forthcoming flagship product, a health-tracking bracelet called the Up3 designed with swimmers in mind, showed the product wasn’t consistently water-resistant.

Scheduled to be released during the holiday season late in the year, the Up3, codenamed “Thorpe” after the Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, contained several new sensors that could measure skin temperature, heart rate, respiration and changes in the electrical current of the skin.