Humon: Helping athletes know more, train better, be their best
Rough Draft Ventures is excited to support students Alessandro Babini and Daniel Wiese as they bring to market a groundbreaking wearable to allow endurance athlete to optimize their performance in real time and beat their personal best.
Humon has built the first thigh-worn wearable that non-invasively measures the way your muscles use oxygen in real time.
While existing technologies like Fitbit that measure heart rate are useful for leisure and recreational athletes, there is limited value that an athlete can draw from such devices to improve their game. Athletes or consumers looking to understand where their body’s limit is and optimize their training are forced to go through an invasive, expensive and time-consuming lactic acid threshold test. “Lactic-acid threshold” refers to the point beyond which sustained effort isn’t possible as a result of a deficit of oxygen in the muscle (translation: How hard you can push your body without tiring out) and is the gold standard metric in endurance training
Humon’s technology uses an optical sensor to determine how the blood within an athlete’s muscle changes color, thus providing information about the oxygen saturation in the muscle. The sensor works in real time, on any skin type, skin color, fat level and is completely non-invasive.
With the Humon wearable, athletes, both professional and amateur, can now optimize performance by simply wearing the comfortable band around the thigh while they train. Humon provides them valuable feedback, helping them regulate intensity, know when and how hard to push themselves, understand how to warm-up and optimize recovery. All these actionable insights are provided in real-time during training, so athletes can optimize performance day after day like never before. Humon can literally help make the world better athletes.
The core team is out of MIT and their product has been vetted clinically, is patent pending, and about to ship the first version of their device to be tested by several professional teams/clubs and Boston based athletes.
They are endorsed and advised by Dr. Matthew Provencher, head medical doctor for the New England Patriots and Chief of Sports Medicine at Mass General Hospital, and Dr. Maria Angela Franceschini who is credited with inventing the gold-standard measurement device for muscle tissue oxygenation.
For more information check humon.io
