Wearables Company Looks to Become Platform Extending to Sports, Health Markets
Wearables such as fitness trackers are ranking high on this year’s “latest and greatest” specials lists, but what’s next for the category beyond counting steps? There’s “nothing wrong with hype” to generate momentum for a new tech category, Davide Vigano, CEO of wearables startup Sensoria, told us. But “what matters” for the category to grow is advancing to “wearable 2.0,” he said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
That means promoting wearables from “glorified pedometers” that consumers wear now as fitness trackers to the next level, Vigano said. “Once you know how many steps you’ve taken a day, what’s the actionable information you get out of it?” Sensoria’s view of wearable 2.0 is that wearables will truly be wearable when they are embedded in clothing that consumers choose based on a fashion or functional purchase rather than when they are accessories that consumers have to remember to put on, he said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have the same type of sensing technology woven or embedded into whatever we decide to wear instead of creating the next-level treasure hunt for the next pedometer?”
Following a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $115,000, Sensoria will begin shipping its smart socks during the CES time frame. It will launch its retail distribution through a U.K.-based sports chain, Vigano said. Sensoria’s overall goal is to become “a platform” for the sports and fitness market, he said.
On how the company was able to develop a textile sensor material that was technologically effective and comfortable, Vigano cited its effort to hire people with “completely different skill sets” in what’s a small, but “multidisciplinary” team. Partners have logged decades as hardware and software designers at Microsoft, and the company added staff with sports gear and signal processing expertise, he said. “Very often a textile materials engineer can solve a software problem, and an electronics engineer can solve a materials problem.”
The company also has sights on the health market. “The ability to inject nontraditional textile sensing technology under the human foot will allow developers to build applications that have never been built before,” Vigano said. Doctors refer to “gait” as the “sixth vital sign,” Vigano said, but there’s been no real-time tool to collect data about a person’s gait.
Wearable 2.0 will enable developers to collect data that’s never been collected before to “professionally improve” people’s lives, Vigano said. Examples include fall detection, he said, citing a statistic that 30 percent of people over 65 in the U.S. experience at least one fall in their lives, amounting to $19 billion in costs.
Elderly patients can wear “glorified accelerometers” that tell whether a person is falling so an ambulance can be dispatched, Vigano said. Sensoria’s sock-based technology would be able to transmit data to a doctor or family member in a predictive way indicating the center of balance is shifting “outside of the green zone,” he said. A patient would also be more likely to wear a sock as a standard clothing article, he said, versus a pendant.
The health application is further ahead, as Sensoria wanted to build a product for the sports and fitness space first before taking on regulatory strategies in the medical device area, Vigano said. But the boundaries between fitness and sports and healthcare are blurring, he said. Sensoria has opened its software development kit to outside developers, and those could include medical device companies that want to build on top of Sensoria’s technology. A Food and Drug Administration Class 1 product that’s exempt from premarket notification requirements “would not be difficult to do,” Vigano said.
The sensor socks are built largely by hand, making them prohibitively expensive, Vigano said. The company is building tools that will let it automate a large part of the process to reduce the manufacturing cost and the price of the socks, currently selling at the company website for $149. Each sock has three textile sensors positioned under the plantar area of the foot including the heel bone and the two metatarsal joints under the big toe and baby toe. The sock cuff has an anklet band that weighs under an ounce packed with additional sensing devices, including an accelerometer, Bluetooth Smart chip and storage. The sock works with a mobile app that can monitor several sensing products, including the company’s sports bra that measures heart rate, Vigano said. “If you go for a run, you can listen to your favorite music [through a smartphone], and the application will talk back to you,” giving information about heel landings or running cadence, he said.
Next up on the fitness side for Sensoria includes applications in cycling and golf. The company has 50 developers building applications for the Sensoria technology for activities including cross-country skiing, yoga and dancing, he said. “People want to build meaningful experiences in multiple areas.”