Skis, boots, glasses and a WRISTBAND

Thanks to the early snows in late au­tumn, ski re­sorts in the Cata­lan Pyre­nees are look­ing for­ward to a bumper sea­son. With some two mil­lion skiers vis­it­ing Cat­alo­nia’s 16 re­sorts each win­ter, ski­ing and re­lated ac­tiv­i­ties have a major eco­nomic im­pact on the coun­try’s econ­omy, par­tic­u­larly in moun­tain areas. The re­sorts La Molina, Vall de Núria, Vall­ter, Espot and Port Ainé, which are all man­aged by the Fer­ro­car­rils de la Gen­er­al­i­tat (FGC) rail op­er­a­tor, alone ac­count for €121.2 mil­lion and pro­vide 2,100 jobs, ac­cord­ing to a study by the UPF Sports Lab study cen­tre at Pom­peu Fabra Uni­ver­sity.

One com­pany hop­ing to take ad­van­tage of the pop­u­lar­ity of ski­ing is Ski­tude, which along with the Eu­re­cat tech­nol­ogy cen­tre has cre­ated a wrist­band that fea­tures radio-fre­quency iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (RFID) and al­lows easy ac­cess to the slopes while dou­bling as a de­vice for mon­i­tor­ing the wearer’s moun­tain-based ac­tiv­i­ties.

Ski­tude has of­fices in Girona and Lon­don and is a lead­ing player in the ski­ing and moun­tain ac­tiv­ity sec­tor. It has also be­come a major so­cial plat­form among skiers and a leader in pro­vid­ing ap­pli­ca­tions for re­sorts. For this sea­son, Ski­tude has launched a pro­to­type RFID wrist­band that al­lows skiers to do away with the tra­di­tional ski pass by au­to­mat­i­cally open­ing bar­ri­ers to the slopes by sim­ply bring­ing the de­vice close to a scan­ner. The de­vice’s Blue­tooth con­nec­tiv­ity also links to an app that mon­i­tors skiers’ ac­tiv­ity, the re­sults of which can then be shared with other mem­bers of the plat­form.

“The wrist­band can be used to down­load ac­tiv­ity data from the cloud for later analy­sis,” says the com­pany’s head of de­vel­op­ment, Daniel Blanco, who adds that the de­vice “is ca­pa­ble of col­lect­ing vari­able data over an ex­tended pe­riod and tracks ac­tiv­ity in a trans­par­ent man­ner that does not in­ter­fere with one’s ski­ing.”

tech­nol­ogy