Montreal-based wearable tech company OMsignal has a connected shirt platform ready and is looking for partners in the clothing market, according to an article by Peter Hadekel in the Montreal Gazette.
The company was founded three years ago by “serial entrepreneur” Stéphane Marceau and has since raised over $11 million in venture capital. Along the way it has developed a system for a shirt with embedded biometric sensors able to track breathing, steps, heart rate, and other measures. A small black box tucked into the shirt uses Bluetooth to transmit that data to an iPhone app, and from there it’s off into the cloud. The whole system is currently priced under $200, and the company is already shipping its own products while looking for partners in fashion to help integrate it into other brands.
Wearable tech is a burgeoning field, with many biometrics-enhanced fitness trackers already on the market and the Apple Watch on the way next year, but the high-profile competition could be helpful to smaller outfits like OMsignal as it gets the mass market accustomed to the idea of wearable tech in their everyday clothing and paves the way for market expansion. As Marceau says in the article, “We’re still at the bottom of the first inning.”
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