To help fight youth obesity in the United States, Adidas has created a wrist-worn wearable device for students taking physical education. Called ZONE, this heart rate monitoring gadget will use the cloud to be able to share a student’s personal fitness data with teachers. This will not only help the kids, but the teachers as well since it will be easier to keep track of each individual’s performance.
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“During the 2015 school year, 600,000 children were connected to the IHT Spirit System, a 140 percent increase in student engagement year over year,” Jen Ohlson, co-founder and president of Interactive Health Technologies, said in a press release. “With the help of the new Adidas ZONE for IHT Spirit, IHT is on track to hit their 2016 target of daily interactions with one million students nationwide.”
Besides the heart rate monitoring, Zone will feature NFC for syncing, and will have enough memory and power to keep up with a busy school schedule. The band will be able to detect the users heartbeat and then release a color based on low, moderate, or high activity. This is imperative for the teachers, because it will show whether or not the student is participating. The wearable will be available for purchase at $139, or a case of 28 for $3,995 (designed for a class).
The launch of ZONE is an intriguing move by Adidas because it directly targets a relatively untapped fitness market in youth physical education. But perhaps most importantly, it could help with the disturbing doubling of childhood obesity in the last thirty years.