A while back, we told you about the FitnessSHIRT, and called it the genesis of smart clothing. Well it didn’t take long for another piece of smart clothing to pop up.
This is the Glowfaster smart-jacket. Currently, the Glowfaster jacket is raising funds through a Kickstarter campaign. To-date, the project has raised £6,195 of its £35,000 goal, with (as of writing) 17 days left to go.
This jacket is unique in several ways. Firstly, here is how the project is described on Kickstarter:
It lights up when you are running, even better the lights on the smart-jacket show you how your training is going, whether your heart rate is at target, whether you were at target speed. The Glowfaster App controls the jacket via Bluetooth to allow the user to set up the smart clothing to their own settings and gain motivation intuitively from their own biofeedback.1
That is a pretty cool concept: visual feedback based on the wearer’s heart rate. The app that controls the jacket – currently only iOS but an Android application is in the works – is full of features:
Our App comes fully loaded to connect to your smart jacket, you can set your running pace and sync it with your jacket, set you target heart rate, flash the light in time with training aids and sound driven games like the Bleep Test, you can even link up to music on your iphone (sic).2
Currently, the early bird backer reward has the Glowfaster jacket priced at £45 which comes to $75.11 USD, with a price of £65 once the early bird deals are gone, $108.49 USD. It stands to reason that the smart clothing market will only expand. We will check in once the campaign is nearing the end. For now, here is the Glowfaster Kickstarter campaign video:
