Tracking the vital signs of ultra-marathoners and other endurance athletes can be of critical importance. Accuracy is key, of course, but so too is compliance. QUS has developed a wearable technology using a smart textile with sensors woven into a washable fabric. The shirt can measure heart and respiratory rates as well as record movement data gleaned from GPS, an accelerometer, and a gyroscope.
“We sat down together with a lot of athletes who are doing crazy things, like marathons through the desert,” said QUS shareholder Maximilian Seidel. “They all want to get rid of the chest strap because they all say it is uncomfortable, they don’t like it.”
QUS debuted at CES last year but is returning next month to offer live simulations in advance of its market launch in the second quarter of 2019. The Austrian company exceeded its recent €25,000 ($28,000) Kickstarter goal in just four days and is now looking for distribution partners and investors.
Endurance sports are but one market for the QUS shirt. The company believes its technology can be used for any team or individual sport. A detachable pod houses GPS and data storage so that a runner, for instance, wouldn’t need to lug his or her cell phone while out on the trail. The data is collected and transmitted via Bluetooth after the activity.
Seidel said there could be applications in medical and health care fields, such as sleep monitoring. There could be utility for QUS for the military, in work safety, and as a stress detection device for high-intensity occupations such as the police force. (Seidel said QUS also received some “very funny requests” about adapting the product for animals. Owners of expensive racehorses and trained falcons were among those to inquire.)
QUS has been conducting validation studies in conjunction with FH Joanneum University of Applied Sciences in Graz and in collaboration with Red Bull. The latter has facilitated testing with its sponsored athletes, such as in a recent competition in Trysil, Norway featuring the Austrian biathlon team. Though the research has not yet been published, Seidel shared some promising early feedback indicating a high degree of accuracy in comparing heart rate as measured by QUS with that from ECG.
“We are currently running a study at a university to implement respiration rate as a new parameter in sports for training duration and intensity,” Seidel said. “This is something that we are able to measure directly from the body from the shirt. Everybody else is calculating it from the heart rate, which is not very precise.”
Introducing metrics about breathing rate would add a new dimension to standard athlete tracking. With the biathlon team in Norway, QUS was able to sync video of performance with the data taken from the wearable to gain a deeper understanding of exercise physiology.
“So you can see what’s happening inside the body at what point in time of the movie,” Seidel said. “This was very interesting.”
Hannes Steiner is the CEO of sanSirro, the company that developed QUS. One of the early backers of the project—and now an advisory board member—was former world No. 1 Austrian tennis player Thomas Muster. Two years ago, a newspaper article about the concept caught Seidel’s attention, prompting him to inquire about offering his experience in electronics and software development. QUS won the German Innovation Award for “Design Thinking” from that country’s national Design Council.
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