By Joe Mullich
Sure, step trackers and calorie counters are helpful. But what if you want be sure your bicep curl form is correct? Or get an alert when your muscles are tired? These are the questions that inspired Cavan Canavan to become a movement detective.
As the wearable tech trend took hold in the mid-2000s, Canavan had mixed feelings. The Georgia Tech graduate and then-athletic shoe designer was excited about footwear sensors that counted the number of steps a person took. But the athletic side of the former high school soccer/basketball player wanted deeper insight about his fitness.
If wearables were as groundbreaking as claimed, surely they could provide more useful information than how many calories he burned on his morning jog. Could all this smart wearable technology be, simply, smarter?
In 2012, Canavan and Grant Hughes founded FocusMotion, a machine-learning software company that captures and crunches data on all types of human movement. It not only helps people improve bench presses and yoga poses, but also guides warehouse workers to lift boxes with less strain.
Kobe And The Dodgers
The Los Angeles Dodgers are among the fitness tech trendsetters that FocusMotion calls partners. The Black Mamba himself, former Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, gave Canavan the stamp of approval — he invested in FocusMotion in August 2016 and joined Canavan and Hughes for a photo op at the New York Stock Exchange.
It's been a heady ride for Canavan, who says he “saw the puzzle pieces of what was happening with wearables and put them together." He talks modestly about his original prototype being made "from duct tape with wires sticking out and blinking lights." But his passion and geek roots become evident when he discusses “dark data" — the nearly limitless amount of information our bodies produce with every subtle movement that is not being collected.
The technology is similar to voice recognition software that lets devices make sense of words. Voice recognition apps capture sound wave data from the human voice to interpret talking speed. Through body sensors, FocusMotion captures data from waves that emanate with each movement. From there, the data flows into a phone or other device to translate it into advice people can use immediately at the gym, on the track or anywhere else they're getting a sweat on.
It may sound straightforward, but the obstacles are huge: A speech recognition program has to be able to understand that a word spoken with a New York, Midwest or Southern accent is the same word. A movement program has to detect slight differences in the way people move, such as knowing which hand goes down first to start or end a pushup. This requires massive amounts of movement data from many people. When Canavan started on his quest, there was virtually no data available on human movement.
“If you were designing Siri, imagine building a speech algorithm where no one had ever recorded a spoken word," he says. “That's what we were up against; we had to collect all of the data ourselves."
Shake, Rattle and Code
In the summer of 2012, Canavan went to a gym and began gathering data with some hardware and sensors he fashioned for the task. His voice rises with excitement when he recollects the moment of realization when the data from a weightlifter began to indicate unique properties of fatigue — such as duration increase, consistency fall-off and shakiness — when he had reached his limit of reps. “We were able to see that wave in an Excel spreadsheet, and at that moment I knew wearables could be used for more than counting steps," Canavan says. “Soon we collected all this hidden data about movement that no one else had."
Its vast database lets FocusMotion track someone’s repetitions of an action, as well as technique and rest time, and compare the data to a template of the ideal motion for that action. FocusMotion doesn't create the wearable devices or apps that customers use. Instead, it licenses the technology to hardware makers and app developers. After FocusMotion debuted at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, it teamed up with Fitocracy, a popular fitness app that helps people reach their fitness goals through communal support and personal coaching.
The Fitocracy app had already been gathering simple measures such as how many calories someone burned after a stint on a treadmill. With FocusMotion it added strength-training data, including exercises performed and number of repetitions, which had never been available on a fitness app before.
Other leading digital health and fitness companies using FocusMotion technology include Kinetic wearables, which partnered with FocusMotion on its study with the NIOSH to reduce unsafe postures in the workforce; and Nadi X, a line of technology-enthused yoga pants that help people perfect their downward facing dog.
Deeper Data Dives
Larger players in the athletics industry are studying the technology as well. The Los Angeles Dodgers did a pilot program with FocusMotion to measure how motion tracking positively impacts athlete training and recovery.
The Cleveland Clinic is studying whether FocusMotion technology is as effective as manual measuring techniques to diagnose and treat shoulder pain sufferers. Canavan hopes the study scientifically validates the company’s ability to precisely detect range of motion.
As sensors become more powerful, Canavan believes his constantly evolving algorithms will offer some jaw-dropping insights. He imagines a time when a person's movement data collection starts at childhood to determine, say, what baseball position he or she should play in high school. Canavan anticipates uniting movement and medical data to unlock secrets about health and fitness.
“Wearables have stagnated," Canavan says. “Many companies have only done step tracking for a long time because it's a simple algorithm that consumes very little battery power. But now we are on the threshold of being able to take deeper dives into the data as we move into multi-device and multi-sensor systems and garments, and find out things about our bodies we could never see before."
Joe Mullich is an L.A.-based storyteller who has received numerous awards for his pieces on business, law, tech, health, humor and various other topics.
