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Calgary Herald

Alberta Innovates invests $340k in province-wide wearable technology

Alberta Innovates is supporting a province-wide wearable technologies initiative to the tune of $340,750. Article content The funding will allow small and medium-sized enterprises to access facilities at the Canadian Sport Institute Alberta, and help move products from prototype to final, releasable product. Article content Article content The Sport Product Testing program had already been working with large clients such as Under Armour and Adidas. The funding will instead go directly to providing smaller teams with that same opportunity to test and validate their emerging wearable tech, otherwise a struggle in the province. Article content 'They are doing things internally, potentially, and they are doing things, if I will say, not properly,' said business development manager for the sport institute, Pro Stergiou. Article content Article content Wearable heart rate monitoring tools from small Albertan developers will be able to compare their results to a full electrocardiogram, allowing them to refine their algorithms and give more accurate results. Sport-specific technology will be granted access to the world-class athletes who train in the facility for their testing data. Without that access to these validation tools, smaller organizations can struggle to make it to market. Article content Article content Stergiou still thinks the industry has plenty of room to grow. After working with some of the largest wearable technology companies in the market, he sees plenty of gaps for smaller teams from Alberta to fill, not just with data collection, but with information analysis. Article content 'Apple, Garmin, Fitbit, all these companies in the wearable device space, they're introducing more and more and more data to the consumer, but they're not helping the consumer — as a health-conscious consumer, as a sport consumer — understand what the data means,' Stergiou said. Article content Article content Adam Kingsmill uses wearable technology every day. He's a Canadian Paralympic sledge hockey goalie who played on the teams that won silver at the Beijing 2022 Paralympics and the world championship in 2024. Article content Kingsmill tracks the miles he runs, bikes or skates. Throughout the long training period of a full season, he says it is a powerful tool to monitor load management and keep himself and the team away from injury.