Eat your heart out Lululemon, SmartMat is about to make personal yoga practices so much better. With 22 days left in its crowdfunding campaign, SmartMat has already raised 248% of its $110,000 goal. Soon to be a member of the $27-Billion yoga industry, SmartMat is a portable, responsive yoga mat that uses sensors and apps to give you real-time data about your practice and help you perfect your postures through auditory and visual feedback. SmartMat talks to you, helps guide you to proper alignment, and records your practice so you can learn and improve over time – in short, SmartMat is the yoga teacher you always wanted, with the privacy you never got.
SmartMat consists of a layer of micro-thin pressure sensors embedded between the two layers that make up a classic yoga mat. These sensors connect to your smartphone or tablet to provide you with real-time information and feedback about your practice, enabling you to make the most of your practice and truly understand what your body is doing and where your challenge areas are. With the SmartMat Marketplace you can download different practices, which the app guides you through in its soothing voice, just like a real yoga teacher.
So much of yoga is about personal growth, inner peace and self-reflection, but until now it has been very difficult for those with little experience to practice on their own. It is also difficult for people with busy schedules to find time to go to a yoga studio – and let’s face it, the videos just don’t cut it. For such total-body engagement we need feedback to know when we are doing things correctly so we don’t misalign our bodies and do more damage than strengthening. SmartMat is a safe solution that brings self-driven yoga practices to everyone, on their own time.
With a retail price of $447, SmartMat is significantly more expensive than an average yoga mat. But paying for yoga classes – especially private ones – can add up: at the rate that I pay, I could buy a SmartMat with the cash from 23 yoga classes at my studio. And the Holiday Run perk on SmartMat’s Indiegogo campaign is selling the mat for $257 – that’s just 14 yoga classes.
SmartMat is the complete yoga experience, a mat and a private teacher all in one. It’s portable, it’s personal, and it’s the future of yoga as we know it.
