Another wearable tech vendor to emerge in recent months is BeBop Sensors (www.bebopsensors.com), a company that CEO Keith McMillen founded, strangely enough, based on his background in music. Like Sensoria, BeBop has also entered the world of sensor-based fabrics, but unlike the Microsoft guys he got his start developing Bluetooth sensors for a violin bow. Fast forward 6 years and his newly formed company now provides more than 20 discrete textile sensors sensitive to size, weight, location, shape, motion, force, and other analog inputs for use in medicine, robotics, and athletics, among other uses. Furthermore, the monolithic fabric sensors provide continuous real-time reporting to produce 3D data maps, which could certainly help improve my golf game.

McMillen believes that company growth will arise from people looking for a ‘quantified self’ in either athletics or healthcare, or simply from ease of use in everyday life. Below you can check out a cool animated video that overviews applications that deploy BeBop’s sensor fabric technology, which I have to add derives its durability from the fabric being processed after the sensors are integrated.

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0dhAJOxWrI;w=529&h=472]