Adidas designed a wearable for PE class
The company wants to help combat youth obesity in the US.
Last year, Adidas made a commitment to help young students stay fit and healthy. This idea was born after the sportswear giant teamed up with Interactive Health Technologies, a firm that provides a connected fitness-assessment platform to schools in the US. Together, they created The Spirt Challenge, which encourages students from kindergarten through high school to be active. In exchange for doing that, they get rewarded prizes such as apparel, equipment and scholarships. And now Adidas is taking its efforts one step further, introducing a wrist-worn wearable designed for physical education classrooms.
ZONE, as the device is called, is a heart-rate monitor that uses the cloud to share a student's personal fitness data with teachers. By doing away with the one-size-fits-all approach to PE classes, Adidas wants to give schools an alternative solution to keep better track of each individual, based on their different levels of health. Other than monitoring heart rate, Zone features NFC for syncing and, according to Adidas, "enough memory and power to keep up with a busy school schedule."
Most importantly, even before today's announcement of the ZONE wearable, the program seems to be having a positive effect on schools. "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."
