Hello everyone! It’s been a while since last post, so I’m sorry about that, but for good reason. We’ve got a big announcement to make. The team at Backtrack is happy to say that later this fall we will be embarking on our first Kickstarter campaign, although we like to think of it as a collaborative crowd science experiment.

Over the past year, as we’ve been building Backtrack, a few things have gotten us really excited. From our work with researchers, clinicians and patients we’ve become very interested in human movement. Movement is an interesting thing: how is it that we move the way we do when we’re healthy? What happens when we get hurt, and move differently as a consequence? How do recovery and rehabilitation affect movement? Human movement is central to physical therapy and rehab, and one of the fundamental building blocks of recovery. While building Backtrack, we’ve been exploring movement tracking and activity recognition and are now ready to start asking some big questions: What does movement look like? How do you visualize it? What are its basic building blocks? We want to share this discovery process with all of you.

We want to release Backtrack as quickly as possible and get it into the hands of tinkerers, developers, and makers. Why? Because we’ve got ideas about what we want to do with Backtrack, but we know you’ve got great ideas too. We’ve always wanted to open up the Backtrack shape-tracking API, so anyone with a project in mind can plug right into our sensor and start building on top of it. Naturally, that means releasing Backtrack to the maker community. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Gofundme, and other crowdfunding home bases have built awesome communities of tinkerers, makers, and early adopters- exactly the kind of people we want playing with Backtrack.

So here’s the collaborative science experiment part. Later this fall, we’re going to launch a campaign where you can pledge to help us out in exchange for a Backtrack sensor as a reward. When you receive your Backtrack, we want you to wear it, build on top of it and play with it. You’ll have the option to post your movement data to our public database so that we learn from it, and others can too. As this movement data comes in, we can start asking those big questions: what does movement look like? How do you visualize it? How can we improve recovery? Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen people build some awesome things with Backtrack at Hack the North in Waterloo, World Maker Faire in New York City, and WearHacks in Montreal. Next up, Kickstarter- dropping early November. Stay tuned!