A fitness Bands for climbing?
One of the Climbax's......is it just me or the name sound odd?
Have you seen someone wearing a Fitbit yet? Seems quite a few people got them for either themselves, or from someone, as a present this Christmas going by the number I've seen around. The jury is still out for me on whether they're actually any good or just a gimmick (I don't see the point of wearing such a device daily unless it can do other tasks, as simple as show me the time!) but I can appreciate the concept*.
We now have a new device to work with climbing - the Climbax, 'a climbing wrist band that assesses your skill'. With some well known names behind it (including some Irish links......), I've been intrigued to see this development. It seems it can tell the hold type you have held on to - mind blown, and would love to know how this is done. The concept seems well thought out, and if it wasn't for a certain trip coming up I'd be purchasing a set for myself to play around with and see Version1.0 of it. A pity as with only six days to go on the Kickstarter campaign, I suspect they're not going to hit their target**.
I'm especially intrigued by the post-analysis setup, there seems to be quite a bit of thought put into it and giving good clear information.
Usual questions are:
- What will version 2.0 do?
- Is the data locked in, or is it possible to integrate with other sports sites/software? (Anyone noticed that everything is getting very spread out in messaging apps - iMessages, Viber, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc etc. The same difficulty with sports sites, all locking your information into their own site...... It's probably a bigger challenge where someone needs to come up with an agreed standard to communicate.
- How does it know when your training session start and end? Is it accurate enough to only know when you're climbing or will I completely confuse when hanging off a fingerboard? Speaking of fingerboard, can it be used to help this?
*Wearable computing in it's current guise reminds me of the early days of smartphones (early 2000's). Absolutely neat concept, but awful integration, interface, clunky and just never doing as much as you'd want them to do. I'm still waiting for the 'iphone' of the wearable computing world to appear and make them mainstream-able.
** They're taking a very 2014-era geeky approach to funding also using Kickstarter which I also have to respect too ;) If anyone is not aware of Kickstarter, if you do donate, the money isn't taken from you unless they hit their target - but the benefit of you showing your interest, and they fail, is they can then go to investors and show that while they didn't make the target, this many people were willing to put down cash so there must be interest in it.