A Carleton-based wearable tech entrepreneurial business won a Best Ottawa Business Award for the #NextBigThingOTT on Nov. 12.
GestureLogic, which is located in the Human Computer Interaction Building on campus, was named as a winner in the Ottawa Business Journal.
Leonard MacEachern, CEO of GestureLogic and an associate professor of engineering and design at Carleton, said the team was very excited.
“It’s a recognition that we’re doing good work,” he said. “When you start getting these awards, you feel you’re on your way to making it as a company.”
GestureLogic is developing a wearable fitness device called LEO, a tension band-like gadget worn around the upper thigh with sensors and a circuit board attached to it. The circuit board connects to a smartphone app that monitors data, such as muscle activity and lactate levels, during exercise.
While the majority of wearable fitness devices focus on measuring motion through acceleration, LEO measures human-generated biosignals—signals produced by the human body.
“The Nike FuelBand doesn’t actually know it’s on a human body,” MacEachern said. “If you leave it on your washing machine during a cycle, it actually counts fuel points and thinks that somebody’s wearing it and moving around.”
As a user wears a LEO device while exercising, it measures, among other things, the contractions in the leg muscles.
“From those signals, we can get much richer data,” MacEachern said. “We can tell you how close you’re getting to that point in exercise where you should back off or keep going. That’s well beyond what Fitbits and FuelBands can do.”
LEO is meant for performance training.
“Those people are pretty motivated and they’re looking to gain the edge,” he said.
LEO is one item in a series of products, MacEachern said.
“Our first product will be geared towards cyclists, but then we can quickly grow into other market verticals,” he said. “All different manners of sports can be covered by this type of technology.”
GestureLogic’s Indiegogo campaign closed in August and raised $143,709, exceeding its original target of $50,000. MacEachern said the company sold about 800 units to more than 600 customers.
MacEachern said the target for shipping the first finished products is next year. GestureLogic is working on concept trials in their lab space.
“It’s starting to look like a real product versus a lab prototype,” he said.
While there are no current Carleton students involved at the company, MacEachern said most of their talent is from former students of the university who continued working with GestureLogic.
MacEachern said the company is growing.
“I think people will probably be very surprised how quickly GestureLogic will grow,” he said.
The awards were presented at the Shaw Centre on Nov. 20.
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