Squid: Will fitness tracking soon move to our clothes?

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, SO MANY brands have launched fitness and health tracking devices recently that it’s hard to keep up. Some gadgets are worn on our wrists, like the Nike Fuelband, some clip to our clothes, like the Fitbit, and others sit happily inside our ears, like Valencell’s devices, but new technology from students at Northeastern University aims to bring effective body monitoring and fitness tracking to our clothes, which in theory sounds comfier, easier and more effective than anything else we’ve seen on the market. But will it work in practice?

The team behind the new tracking technology, which is called Squid, have fitted a number of electrodes inside a special compression shirt, which when worn by someone working out, will feed all kinds of data back to a dedicated mobile application and a slick looking web interface.

The thing that makes Squid stand out, is it’s not just going to give you basic data about where you’ve been running and how long for, but it’ll gauge all kinds of sensitive muscle activity and even count reps, so you don’t have to. Although we think that’s bordering on the lazy side, don’t you?

If you were wondering, the system is called Squid because it has ‘tentacle-like’ EMG sensors, which are specially fitted to track your muscle usage. We’re not sure whether that makes us feel happy that we’ve got a little workout companion, or freaked out that there’s a fake mollusc on our chests.

The Squid system is still in the early development stages, but it’s a great way of taking the hassle out of working out and fitness tracking. The shirt doesn’t seem quite as streamlined and fitted as we’d like, but we imagine as the technology advances, so will the materials used to make it more workout friendly.

[Via Engadget]