Author: Milos Kovacevic

Concordian talent in quest to build world’s first smart-suit

Wearable devices are all the rage with future-friendly individuals. Think Nike fuel bands masquerading as innocuous bracelets until they flash your step count or calories, smart watches that can talk to you and Google Glass. The trend has so far been leaning towards unobtrusive technology that fulfills its role while eliminating clunky jetpacks and blinking lights.

Montreal’s Heddoko is a sleek new start-up banking on this idea of wearable technology, except instead of aiming small, they want to adapt it to a full-body experience by combining motion-capture technology pioneered by Hollywood and the gaming industry to create the world’s first athletic smart-suit.

By embedding motion sensors — originally used for the green screen or Wii — to precisely capture how your body is moving and combining it with some app wizardry, Heddoko’s smart-suit will help athletes know exactly how their exercise regimens are progressing and help make workouts better and more efficient.

CEO Mazen Elbawab has years of experience under his belt working for Ubisoft and Microsoft, not to mention a consulting career. He helped develop the Kinect system of motion sensing input devices that could read user movements and voice commands. The time spent perfecting such gadgetry also gave him a perspective on how to take it further.

“So far there’s only been information coming out of it,” said Elbawab, an athlete himself with a particular keenness for martial arts, whose passion for sport helped germinate the idea. “No one has tapped into giving something meaningful back and turning that information into knowledge.”

His invention probably won’t replace the physical presence and personalized expertise of a human coach, but it won’t be too distant of a second best. Just think: instead of trudging out on a cold winter’s morning to hit the gym or commuting to yoga practice, you’ll be able to slip into a comfortable smart-suit without ever stepping outdoors and have feedback on hand. That yoga pose or martial arts sequence? Your phone (or, supposedly, any compatible display) will tell you how to nail them both and offer the visuals and statistics to take things to the next level.

Ultimately, Heddoko has ambitious plans. The niche market at the moment will be athletes willing to spend an estimated $400 for the final product, but Elbawab believes there’s no reason why the technology couldn’t be adapted to the medical field — where the suit’s sensitivity could help with physiotherapy  and healing injuries — or beyond.

Though Elbawab agrees Heddoko has done much, the technological and business hurdles have been substantial. With the help of established Montreal entrepreneurs and investors, Elbawab’s team has ballooned to 15 engineers, businessmen and programmers. He has partnered with Concordia’s District 3, the meeting place for creativity, entrepreneurship and engineers to bandy about ideas, network and collaborate. “In a matter of four months we went extremely far. People usually struggle in building a first prototype,” he said. Heddoko’s proof of concept — a single working arm — managed to break it into the top three hottest inventions.

The technological side of things hasn’t been easy. “We can talk about the engineering difficulties for hours,” he said when prompted to elucidate. The range of conditions in which his invention would have to perform flawlessly is daunting. As anybody from a NASA scientist piloting a rover on Martian soil to a Vietnam veteran hoping his firearms don’t get jammed can tell you, everyday conditions can be the hardest to surmount — and the fancier the technology, the bigger the problems. A suit would have to perform as well in -20 celsius temperatures as 30 celsius, and be expected to go from one to the other, day in day out. A shirt can be washed to expunge the accumulated sweat and smells your body expels over hours — a mesh of circuits and sensors cannot. Another challenge has been optimizing sensor placements to their ideal points on the human body to accurately capture movement, a complicated task when you realize every part of our body is constantly changing in three dimensional space in relation to any other point.

While Elbawab admits much of the technology already exists on the shelf, that doesn’t mean it’s efficient or specialized enough for his purposes. Case in point: they’ve been in partnership with another start-up solely focused on the battery system that will deliver the juice to make the suit function. Elbawab hopes the ideal battery will have enough power on a single charge to last an entire week.

Finding investors will be just as difficult, if not more so. Speaking from experience, Elbawab knows the product, no matter how attractive, won’t sell itself.

“I went back and forth a lot,” he said about his strategy to bring in money. He tried selling the technology, appealing to potential buyers on his level, the level of gadgetry and technical ingenuity. He said people didn’t understand it. Only when he found a way that enabled his listeners to relate on the athletic level did he get the support no amount of cool technology could. It was a matter of speaking to people on their own level, and knowing the right people. “You have to know what problem you’re trying to solve with that technology,” he said, and outlines how he envisions, in his words, democratizing the gym lockers of athletes with a technology that has up until now remained confined to Hollywood.

Thankfully, Montreal’s prime location as an attractive hub of software and programmers will make things easier. District 3 has given him the chance to attract many talented young individuals, Concordians above all, to his project in exchange for the mentoring and intense start-up workload regular interns wouldn’t get in large corporations.

There are further challenges ahead. “Once we get to the prototype level, 99 per cent of the innovation will come from the software,” said Elbawab. He aims to finalize a functional prototype by the end of 2014 and launch a crowdfunding campaign. Until then, Elbawab is performing market research to determine which crowdfunding platform will be ideal for his purposes, and said Montreal will be the first place to have access to the suits.

Concordia holds panel to discuss the challenges of how to best move forward

Four experts convened on Tuesday at a Concordia-organized event to weigh in, and argue for and against, various models Canada could take up in response to the recent ruling by the Supreme Court declaring the country’s prostitution laws unconstitutional.

The panel discussion, entitled “Canada’s Decriminalization of Prostitution: What’s Next?” and  moderated by McGill law professor Alana Klein, featured Robyn Maynard, outreach worker at Montreal’s Stella ; Stan Burditt, founder of Men Against Sex Trafficking; Sarah Mah of the Asian Woman’s Coalition Ending Prostitution; and Terry-Jean Bedford, former sex-worker and current dominatrix, activist, and one of the individuals who successfully challenged and overturned the prostitution laws last December.

The main event, divided between opening statements and a debate on panelist viewpoints, made apparent that while both sides agreed to the fundamentals – such as the ineffectual nature of erstwhile legislation and a lack of safety for practitioners – the devil was in the details.

Broadly speaking, Bedford and Maynard argued for decriminalization as the best way of bringing agency to sex workers and tearing down of the walls of stigma and silence surrounding the world’s oldest trade. For Bedford, state-sanctioned legislation and not state-regulation of consenting  acts between adults is the road to empowerment.

“In all the work that we’ve been doing to combat violence against sex workers, the laws have been a major impediment for people’s ability to defend themselves,” said Maynard about past legislative attempts to ban the practice.

In particular, they referred to New Zealand’s decriminalization methods as a model Canada could emulate.

The ability to publicly organize, negotiate, and run services, they explained, would facilitate safety standards and workspace regulations.  Prostitutes should not be seen as browbeaten, helpless individuals, and neither should their clients be perceived as automatic predators. Why, they asked, is selling one’s body for sex considered degrading, while selling it for all other forms of paid labour fully accepted?

In one emotional moment, Bedford recalled how sex is often bought by those who couldn’t get it by other means.

“A lot of men need us to be their voice,” said Bedford, calling sex as much therapeutic as it is carnal.

Mah and Burditt on the other hand see prostitution as inherently immoral, asymmetric in power, and abusive, particularly towards minorities and those without recourse to justice.

“We know that the women who are trafficked are overwhelmingly women of colour, poor women, and women from third-world countries,” said Mah, defining  it as ‘entrenched racism and sexism’ beholden to pimps and criminals. Both defended the so-called Nordic Model, a Swedish-born method that legalizes the selling but not buying of sexual services as a way to provide redress and compensation to those exploited while continuing to outlaw the actions of their exploiters.

“Prostitution is a form of men’s violence against women and is an expression of extreme gender inequality,” Burditt stated. Thus, he says, rather than giving them legal validity, “the proceeds of [exploitation], such as money, cars, and property, should be seized and the money used to fund programs used to help the recovery of those impacted. [The traffickers] should be designated as criminal organizations, because that’s exactly what they are.”

“Our group advocates for the abolition of prostitution as a profoundly racist form of violence against women and we formed to build awareness around the harms of prostitution,” said Mah.

Overall, as one commenter pointed out afterwards, the differences were between systems that encouraged economic and social incentives for a safe, willing, and orderly transaction of sex, versus a system punishing violent and illegal activity which denied sex workers their autonomy.

“We need to remind the public that sex worker’s voices need to be at the heart of this,” said Maynard. “It is not fair to sacrifice the lives of sex workers … as the way to achieve gender equality.”

Though mostly even toned and empirical, there were moments of emotion, most noticeably toward the end, and particularly by Bedford, sporting the steely resolve that has seen her fight on behalf of sex workers for two decades.

The event, preceded by finger food and drinks, was capped off by question and answer session featuring several high-caliber questions from the audience and an opportunity for the audience to purchase literature related to the discussion.