Consumer Apps for Real-Time Biofeedback

Interesting companies and products will come from the commoditization of technologies related to real-time biofeedback. Let’s illustrate with an example.

Yale Professor Robert Grober has developed a device that lets you hear your golf swing. It’s an instrumented golf club with sensors that wirelessly transmit data to a receiver, which in turn converts the club’s telemetry data into an audio soundscape. Different swing parameters contribute to the soundscape, allowing the golfer to “visualize”—through sound—his/her swing as it happens.

The “as it happens” part is critical, because the core skill in golf is developing muscle memory to swing and putt correctly, consistently. Getting the feedback of what you’re doing while you’re doing it is much better than, say, reviewing a video of your swing.

Grober’s company, Sonic Golf, has a Web site, which explains why this product is becoming real now:

Sonic Golf products are enabled by the convergence of four technologies, each one of which is driven by an existing industrial base: 1) silicon based sensors, including MEMs accelerometers (automotive industry) and gyroscopes; 2) low power hand held electronics, including micro-power microprocessors and micro-power A/D converters (PDA and cell phone industry); 3) digital music synthesis (sound cards, computer multimedia/gaming applications); and 4) the IEEE 802.15.4 communications protocol (Zigbee) for extremely low power (mW), relatively low bandwidth (100s kB/sec) wireless communications.

In other words, the key enabling technologies are available off-the-shelf, at reasonable cost. Besides the obvious variations on Sonic Golf for other sports, how else might these technologies be applied?

Let’s start with a system for improving posture. If you are unaware of this market, a Froogle search for “posture” yields 19,000 listings for product prices at retailers. As with a golf swing, learning to sit and stand correctly is well-suited to biofeedback using real-time sound. However, the market is no longer just golfers; it’s everybody. (Cue ominous voiceover: “Bad posture not only affects how others perceive you. It hurts your health.”)

What about a chef’s knife that uses sound to tune the user’s skills at slicing, dicing, chopping, mincing, and such? How about a bicycle that helps kids learn how to ride it?

If we assume that component costs drop so low that almost anything can be “sonified,” what happens? Smart chopsticks, anyone?

Update, June 1, 2026: The original post had a link to the Froogle search results. Froogle (Google’s first product-specific search engine) is now long gone. Unsurprisingly, the Internet Archive didn’t archive Froogle search results for “posture.”