Armed and ready for action
A pair of students have created a smart arm sleeve that could warn you when you’re about to do some damage.
The Ziel M2 prototype is designed to monitor the stress on baseball pitchers’s forearms, letting the wearer know when they are at risk of damaging a muscle.
The wearable uses a combination of sensors to feed real-time information back to a connected phone or tablet. While the two creators, from Rice University, are aiming this primarily at baseball players, it has applications well beyond that, including running and repetitive strain injuries.
The creators realised that a quarter of professional baseball players have had surgery on their arm due to prior injuries caused by overexertion and bad technique.
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Their idea was to come up with something that would prevent injuries in the first place, by providing information that’s easy to understand and not just a case of throwing numbers at the user.
Engadget reports that the sleeve is expected to cost around $250 with a coaching subscription of $10 a month. However it seems we won’t see it on the market until the end of 2018, so it will be interesting to see how it develops between now and then. You can read more on Ziel’s website.
