This Year’s Must-Have Accessory: Wearable Technology
Holding a technological device in your hand may be the trend today, but increasingly we’re going to be wearing our technology. This is way beyond a hands-free attachment for your smart phone. I’m talking technological clothing and other accessories that you wear to use.
For example, there already is a product called “The Helmet Hero.” With it, you can take a helmet, such as a bicycle, ski, or motorcycle helmet, and mount a small high-definition camera on it that can record as HD video or capture still photography. Thanks to an SD card, you can record up to 2½ hours on a single charge.
Additionally, since one of hard trends of technology is to make things smaller and smaller, you can create high-quality video or still camera pictures from a very small lens that’s clipped to your sunglasses, and then upload it directly to Facebook or other social media platforms. So, for example, if you’re walking on the beach or hiking a mountain, you can have that feed go directly to your video Facebook page.
While this sounds great, the newest wearable technology goes even beyond all this. For example, Adidas has created an “intelligent football boot” that can upload performance data, including your maximum speed, minimum speed, the number of sprints you took, the distance you took for each sprint, the distance you went at a high-intensity level, etc. In other words, they’ve created a true training device that keeps track of your entire training regimen. They started with football, but it will surely spread to other sports.
Going a little further, the US military has developed smart underwear. It looks just like normal underwear, but it has micro sensors that can monitor respiration, heart rate, body posture, and skin temperature. Now we can really see what’s happening with troops in the field. And since all the data can be transmitted wirelessly, we can monitor the well-being of all of the people in real time. If someone has a problem or has been wounded, we already have body monitors on them in their underwear.
Now let’s take that to the next level. If this technology works for the military, couldn’t intelligent underwear work for professional sports too? Of course. It can track hydration levels, heart rate, and other things to help coaches determine when to pull someone from the field.
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