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Jawbone Up4 tapcash wristjob: Get BONKING with the latest sweaty hipster toy

'Advanced sleep'. You’ve unlocked a new level: Snoring

After deciding you deserve a cappuccino — earned following a particularly good workout — you can now use your Jawbone UP4 bracelet to pay for it.

Jawbone, which makes cool Bluetooth things, has done a deal with Amex to add a pay-by-bonk account to its exercise-measuring wrist decoration.

The $199 UP4 will initially only allow contactless payments in the US and so will (almost certainly) suffer from the same lack of terminals as Apple Pay.

The UP4 tracker is based on the UP3, a bracelet which was very late to ship as Jawbone tried and failed to make it completely waterproof, and able to cope with the wearer going for a swim.

Instead, it handles the much less arduous conditions of advanced sleep and activity tracking and heart health monitoring.

“In addition to enabling contactless payments," said the San Francisco headquartered company, "UP4 is also backed by our industry-leading UP app and Smart Coach system, which helps people move more, sleep better and eat healthier each day.”

As with Apple Pay, and pretty much all the web-based systems for taking credit cards, the Jawbone system uses tokenisation.

Jawbone’s bonking wrist-job won’t contain the full credit card details; when you initialise it with an iOS or Android app a unique token is created to identify you to American Express.

"In partnership with Jawbone, we've created a seamless payment experience all in the tap of a wrist," opined Leslie Berland, American Express EVP, Digital Partnerships and Development.

The UP4 is expected to be available in the summer. It will no doubt be the cue for the whole community of NFC fanbois to say that 2015 is the “year of NFC”. ®

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