TritonWear: Changing the Swimming Game, One Stroke at a Time
Imagine having a legion of personal assistants by your side at all times – allowing you to (at least, figuratively) be in multiple places at once. For professional swimming coaches, TritonWear is making that pipe dream of omnipresence a reality. By moving coaches from the sidelines to the center of action, the Canadian wearable tech company is effectively taking the guesswork out of competitive swimming.
While studying in the University of Waterloo’s Mechatronics Engineering program, Tristan Lehari spent his free time as a varsity athlete on the university swim team. After spending his final remaining two years of his time there as a coach, he became well acquainted with the massive challenges – and massive opportunities – faced by competitive swim teams. In 2013, he founded TritonWear with the goal of ensuring the hard work coaches and swimmers put into their training would be harnessed through the power of wearable technology.
Tristan and his co-founder, Darius Gai, started exploring their idea by strapping a sensor-ridden GoPro to swimmers while training, and have since iterated and developed the technology into a sleek, non-invasive device. Now a small unit that easily clips on to the back of a swimmer’s goggle strap, the Triton automatically calculates key performance metrics and provides data feedback to the coach’s tablet. Data points such as splits, stroke count, distance-per-stroke, turn time, and time underwater, are tracked in real time and distilled into meaningful visualizations via a Bluetooth-connected app.
For many of us, fitness can often be a mental and emotional endeavour. In taking a data-driven approach, Triton allows coaches to rely on biometric facts, rather than instinct, giving them unprecedented insight into what is actually happening underwater. Thus far, dramatic results have ensued. Kevin Anderson, Head Coach of the Mississauga Swim Club, has likened the TritonWear system to “having 20 [other coaches] constantly gathering performance data.” He says he now has more time focus on his athletes and fix technique issues than ever before, without losing critical workout data recorded for each athlete.
“Real-time data in a coach’s hand is a powerful tool that will allow coaches to optimize each swimmer’s training program,” said Tristan Lehari. “As a competitive swimmer myself, I know the incredible work that coaches and swimmers devote to being their best. We wanted to create something that would ensure all that hard work was being done as effectively as possible in order to enable swimmers to meet their goals and beyond.”
After being part of University of Waterloo’s VeloCity program, currently working out of the Communitech Hub in Waterloo and having just recently graduating ed from The Next Founders program, TritonWear is a wearables company well on its way to revolutionizing competitive swimming, one stroke at a time.
This guest blog post was written by Ainsleigh Burelle of The Next 36. More information on The Next Founders, a program for Canada’s most promising young entrepreneurs, can be found at http://www.thenextfounders.ca and on Communitech’s Hub available at www.communitech.ca.
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