A minuscule drone on your wrist captures your video during a workout. A smart shoe tracks your heart rate and your goggles monitor your miles and give an instant response when you ask, “How’s my pace?” No, this is not a scene from the next action-packed Marvel flick. In fact, such gadgets are part of reality today in the sport and fitness world and most of these come in the form of a wearable.
Innovative wearable technology for fitness and sports are slowly on the rise. Whether you’re a die-hard gym bunny who wants to track your daily workout activity or a sports fanatic who aim to improve your playing experience, there’s a wearable to address your need.
Today, we have rounded up 10 most innovative wearable fitness and sports gadgets that will not only help you to stay fit but also offer you some really cool sports feature.
- 4iii Sportiiii Sunglasses Mount
Have you ever been riding along and just barely missed a car pulling out as you glanced down at your watch to check out your pace or heart rate? What if you can access all of your workout analytics literally right in front of your eyes? Yes, you can do that with the Sportiiii sunglasses mount.
The Sportiiiis Heads-Up Display clips onto your sports sunglasses and captures data from a heart rate monitor or other ANT+ devices, and projects color LED visuals in front of you. Thus, it gives athletes real-time performance feedback—on the move, anywhere, anytime along with audio prompts—to help you reach your training targets for heart rate, speed, pace, cadence, and power.
- Lumo Lift
“Sit up straight!”, “Don’t slouch!” These are some of the common words we have heard from our parents while growing up. And this is important because how your body is positioned when you are sitting, standing and laying down play a crucial role in your health. While good posture with properly aligned bones, muscles, joints, and ligaments help you function at peak efficiency, bad posture can cause more problems than you realize. Even just fifteen minutes of reading or typing activity with the wrong positions can exhaust the muscles of your neck, shoulders and upper back.
Lumo Lift is designed to solve this problem. The little device is worn just below your collarbone to track core position, upper body position and other nuances of posture. Made up of two tiny devices, the tracker and a small magnetic plate, the device detects curvature at the top of your spine along with the positioning of your shoulders, chest, and upper back. Using angle displacement as a measure, the device’s biomechanics monitoring sensors allow Lumo Lift to know when your body slouches and gently vibrates.
- Catapult Playr Smart Football Tracker
If you want to know how many sprints you made, what your heatmap looks like and how fast you run during a football match, the Catapult Playr Smart Football Tracker might be just for you. This FIFA authorized wearable GPS tracker sits in a vest which is worn by the player during a football match. It helps to analyze and improve the performance of the football players while enabling them to view their speed, distance, power, sprint distance, load, intensity, and positioning on their smartphone using an intuitive app.
- XMetrics Pro Swim Tracker
While swimming your arms remain in motion and when you break stroke to check on your progress, you no longer propel yourself towards your goal. Instead, you begin to slow down due to the drag from that out of place limb. With XMetrics Pro Swim Tracker, there is no more slowing down. Attached to your goggles, the Pro Swim Tracker sits just on the back of your head, out of the way to minimize drag. The wearable device also provides customizable real-time audio feedback directly while swimming just like a virtual coach.
- Sensoria Smart Socks
The Sensoria smart socks feature three sensors stitched on the underside with one near the heel and two on the ball of your foot. All you need to do is to wear them according to the “LEFT” and “RIGHT” labels and it will track the performance of each foot individually. Then a Bluetooth bracelet on top needs to be connected to your smartphone through the Sensoria App and it will collect the analytics on your foot landing, cadence, the pace at which you run at, calories burned, distance, speed, ascent, and total steps.
- Moov HR Sweat Band
Rather than going for the wrist like every other gadget, Moov’s latest tracker dares to do something different. It is a thin, black headband that accurately tracks your heart rate for your workouts. Wearing the tracker up near the temples of the head makes it easier to track the heart rate because of the increased blood flow and thin skin. Inside the band, there is a small silicone casing and that’s where the sensor is placed. And once the headband is in place, you need to open the Moov app and pick out your workout.
- Leomo Type-R Cycling Wearable Coach
The Leomo Type-R Cycling wearable coach is something that can grab the attention of every hardcore professional cyclist out there. This revolutionary product gives cyclists the ability to gain insight into movement metrics. It comes with five small and lightweight rechargeable Bluetooth sensors and the type-R Sensors are attached to your feet, thighs, and pelvis. As you cycle, the system will record all of your movements at a lighting fast speed of 100 data points per second while keeping track of your cadence, speed, heart rate, power balance, and other metrics. The data is then sent automatically to the wearable’s display on your handlebars from where you can see all the information in the blink of an eye.
- Hykso Boxing Wearable
The boxing wearable by Hysko keeps tabs on the punch data for serious fighters sparring against an opponent. It features a pair of connected punch trackers that you can slip inside your hand wraps after pairing them. A little tap will turn on the blue and red lights on the tracker to indicate which is for the left and which is for the right hand, and then it’s time to get them fitted. You need to position them just below the wrist while facing out towards your fist and ensure that they are secure. Once done, it will keep track of the number of punches you throw, as well as the type and speed and you can see the Intensity Score metric through its companion app.
- Nadi X Smart Yoga Pants
While the market is brimming with tech outfits that track activity, we found Nadi X smart yoga Pants distinctive. Embedded with technology that senses your body movement, the line of yoga cloth reacts to your body and uses haptic vibrations to correct your movements. For instance, if your form is off around your knees or legs, the vibrations will signal you that you need to tighten up or move a certain way.
- Mpower Wearable Pod
Training your body and building muscles on your own is not an easy feat to achieve as you have to keep track of every minute detail which you possibly can’t do all by yourself. This is where Mpower jumps in. The novel sports wearable is a simple 23-gram pod which can be attached to the area around your muscles to measure your muscle strength. Using the surface EMG (sEMG) technology, the pod measures the EMG electrical signals produced by the muscles during exercises and then the information is sent to a connected smartphone app. It provides information regarding the muscle fatigue, maximum muscle activation power, and fast muscle fiber activation levels and so on.
The role of technology in our lives is rapidly growing and it is not showing any sign of waning anytime. The rise of innovative wearable technology has been fuelled by technology’s tendency to get faster and smaller at the same time. So, what’s next for wearable technology in the sports and fitness industry is actually hard to imagine. However, there is no doubt that these types of innovations are just the beginning and we can expect to see a more advanced wearable future ahead.