The last year or so has seen a tremendous rise in the number of wearable devices that are capable of an increasingly diverse and impressive range of tasks. Whilst these devices range from bracelets to sweatbands, bandages to heart monitors.
Arguably the most well known however are the kind of watches made famous by the Apple Watch. The device bares little really in common with a traditional watch, capable as it is of performing a wide range of tasks.
With telling the time only a fraction of what it’s capable of, it’s easy to believe that the Apple Watch should not be branded alongside more traditional watches, which have a more timeless quality to them.
Making all watches ‘smart’
Nevertheless, a Spanish start-up is trying to bring the technical gadgetry of the smart watch to their more traditional peers. The company, called MainTool, aims to combine the style of traditional watches with the wizardry of smart watches.
“Each watch has a culture. It’s so much more than something that just tells time. It’s about the brand. It’s about how it looks. It’s about how it makes people feel. Today’s smartwatches destroy this. Our solution doesn’t,” CEO Hussain Ahamed says.
They have developed a strap that allows users to render their classic watch smart, or at least smarter. The straps come equipped to measure things like your heart rate, your skin temperature, your exercise levels and so on.
Whilst the output of this measurement won’t appear on your watch, it can be transmitted to any mobile device via the MainTool app, thus allowing you to preserve the style and look of your favorite watch, whilst still securing some of the tech wizardry of a smart watch.
With wearable devices becoming ever more popular, it seems inevitable that users will increasingly strive for things that look fantastic as well as provide them with great functionality.
Devices such as the MainTool watch strap help to provide that. As far as I’m aware, they’re the first company to offer such a service, and they’re well worth keeping an eye on.
That pretty cool actually. I like it.
That’s very good, I like it.
Interesting approach, although to be honest, the allure of 'smart watches' has been kind of lost on me thus far. Maybe in time they'll develop the kind of functionality that will make sense, but for the time being they're just a bit of a gimmick imo.
Erratum.Maintool is not a spanish company !
Just looking at the maintool website .it s french stat up installed near Paris.
The folks I spoke to were from their Madrid office, apologies if I have incorrectly appropriated them to the country.
Thanks for the comments, we are a French company based in Madrid and Paris, but our HQs are actually in Madrid.
Thanks for the clarification Asier.