OMsignal’s Workout Clothes Share Biometric Data with Your Smartphone

OMsignal Smart Fitness Shirt

The compression garments developed by OMsignal collect vital details about your workout and send them to your smartphone, so you can quantify yourself and your performance over various periods of time.

The term wearable tech has a more literal meaning with each passing day. Biometric sensors are moving from wristbands and smartwatches to smart clothes and socks. After all, the best way to track fitness performance is to cover as great of a body area as possible.

Stéphane Marceau, CEO and co-founder of OMsignal, explained the necessity for biometric shirts: “We’ve been wearing clothing all our lives. It’s the most natural and therefore the ultimate ‘wearable’ medium. Clothing has always been about protection and fashion, but it will now also help motivate us to better ourselves every day. You would never drive a car without a speedometer, RPM or a fuel gauge, right? Well, with OM, you now get a dashboard to better steer your life, to increase your self-mastery, to push your fitness performance, and live a healthier lifestyle.”

Marceau also explained how the technology behind biometric sensors evolved in the recent years, and how wearables based on such sensors became a reality: “Exercise physiology research has defined human performance through intricate lab studies, but the technologies researchers use were never available for everyday and the aspiring athlete. You could never bring hospital or lab-type equipment with you on the court or track. OMsignal now makes it easy to track biometrics in real time, in real life and during sports activity. At OMsignal we’ve focused on giving consumers quality insights on performance, taking the research a step further to guide users to their peak performance.”

If it wasn’t obvious enough from the previous picture, then I’ll tell you that the OMsignal smart fitness shirts come in four styles: with long or short sleeves, with no sleeves at all and… I can’t seem to be able to pin the fourth style. Anyway, there seems to be a style and size for everybody, regardless if they’re working out indoors or outdoors.

The company is already taking pre-orders, and the biometric shirts are expected to be shipped this summer. A kit comprising a t-shirt and a smart black box that sends biometric data to your smartphone can be owned for $199, but the retail price is expected to be higher.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the Sensoria smart sock and the Cityzen smart shirt that acts as a fitness tracker.

FBI to roll out $1 billion public facial recognition system in 2014, will be on to your evildoing everywhere

FBI to roll out $1 billion public facial recognition system in 2014, will be on to your evildoing

They're watching you -- or at least will be in a couple of years. That's when the FBI is gearing up for a nationwide launch of a $1 billion project designed to identify people of interest, according to the New Scientist. Dubbed the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, the high-tech endeavor uses biometric data such as DNA analysis, iris scans and voice identification to track down folks with a criminal history. The FBI also plans to take NGI on the road literally by using public cameras to pick faces from the crowd and cross check them with its national repository of images. Let's just say this facial technology isn't going to be used for lighthearted Japanese vocaloid hijinks or unlocking your electronic device. The use and scope of NGI, which kicked off a pilot program in February, will likely be questioned not just by black helicopter watchers but privacy advocates as well. Facial recognition has certainly been a touchy issue in privacy circles -- something Facebook learned firsthand in Germany. Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is already raising concerns about innocent civilians being mixed up or included in the database. Naturally, the FBI claims that the NGI program is in compliance with the U.S. Privacy Act. On the positive side, at least they didn't name it the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.

Filed under:

FBI to roll out $1 billion public facial recognition system in 2014, will be on to your evildoing everywhere originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 09 Sep 2012 08:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Next Web  |  sourceNew Scientist  | Email this | Comments