City Football Group’s ‘smart scarf’ takes fandom into the future with match day heart rate monitor

Just when you thought football scarves had reached the final stage of development with high resolution, 22 color images were created thanks to the introduction of 12-gauge automatic knitting machines, City of Manchester was born and pushed the humble accessory of tomorrow into the digital age.

Indeed, City is working on developing the world’s first “smart scarf” that, among other modern functions, will be able to monitor the wearer’s physiological responses during games. The project is a collaboration between the incumbent Premier League champion and Cisco, the giant global technology corporation headquartered in California. Cisco also becomes the current official technology partner of City Football Group.

“The idea for this project came from looking at how much performance data is going on for elite players. So we thought, why don’t we do the same for the next fans? strength for this sport?” Chintan Patel, Chief Technology Officer at Cisco for the UK and Ireland.

To the untrained eye, the “Connecting Scarf” appears to be an ordinary football scarf. However, the striped textile suit comes with a biosensor to monitor the fans’ vital stats during any given match.

Those different data points will tell us how different fans are feeling at different times, from anger and relief, to joy and disappointment. “Someone scoring a goal might be the highlight for one fan, but for another it could be a goalkeeper save or a two-player collision. So there’s a lot of it. what can happen from this,” Patel said on the nuances of the macro-level approach to this data.

“The scarf helps us study fan passion and ultimately, what can fans get out of it in terms of their own behavior? We really wanted to see those impactful moments. will look like and demonstrate to the fans their connection to the club.”

Perfect every inch Kevin De Bruyne through the ball, and all the cruelty Erling Haaland finish – it will all be recorded in biometric form and reduced to industry-leading spiking and perspiration telemetry.

According to Reuters, the smart scarf is still in beta development and is unlikely to be marketed to Man City fans as early as next season (2023-24). Before that, the team planned to distribute a small amount to selected fans of Man City and MLS Franchising New York City FCwho are also on the City Football Team, to go through a series of live test events.

The idea of ​​the scarf, at least according to the accompanying press release, is to form even closer unity between football clubs and their fans – perhaps by collecting and their biometric data.

According to Cisco, what the club intends to do with all the biological information after the game, although the data will be anonymized without considering specific individuals, according to Cisco.

As for whether the smart towel itself can withstand a full wash cycle at 30 degrees after being steadily soaked with the wearer’s neck sweat in consecutive home matches, the scarf can be wash but the micro board and internal weight (ensures the conductive sensor on the skin effectively) will be removed and re-applied once the towel is cleaned and dried.

Two simple queries but perfectly legal in their own right – both of which we can suspect more answers will be needed when the scarf is released to the public.

“In the next few years, we’ll see tens of billions of other things connected to the internet, and our question is, why not the scarf?” Patel said.