Vitality monitors and activity trackers have become big business in recent years. After all, they are essentially a personal trainer you can stow in your pocket without all of the creepy pseudo-flirtation and hourly rates. However, one group of sports enthusiasts are usually left in the cold by all of this advancing technology. We refer to, of course, those who participate in extreme sports. Skateboarding, surfing and the like are simply too high impact for most of these devices to be worth their weight in Mountain Dew. They’ll either break immediately, drown immediately or just offer no useful information. After all, seeing how many miles you’ve “walked” when you were surfing isn’t too helpful.
Don’t worry boarders, the wearable technology industry has got you covered. Introducing TRACE, the world’s first activity monitor exclusively designed for extreme sports. First of all, this thing is sturdy. You actually attach it to your sporting tool of choice, be it skateboard, surfboard or snowboard. No matter how badly you crash or how high you go, this thing is designed to never fall off and to never break. As far as what information it collects, it picks up on height, stunts successfully pulled and all kinds of stuff. The information is then beamed, via the magic of Bluetooth, to the smartphone of your choice. Yay Bluetooth!
TRACE also incorporates some neat gamification elements, with daily leaderboards and other odds and ends. It’s not available yet, but you can roll on down to their Kickstarter and plop down $100 to get yourself a surfside seat to the early bird special. In the meantime, you can just build a really, really high ruler to measure your jumps. Check out a video of it in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9IE4U1jBgY
