FightCamp wants to strengthen the body while Neurable is focused on helping people avoid burnout.
It’s that time of year when many on Wall Street are thinking about what to spend their well-earned bonuses on. To help those with pending bonuses, I am starting an ongoing series of postings that could serve as a guide for gifts and gadgets.
For this post, I would like to focus on two different offerings: one that can improve the body and another that strengthens the mind and helps to ward off burnout.
Boxing Meets Machine Learning
As for the body, a boxing workout is considered to be one of the best ways to get in shape. The challenge is finding a gym that has boxing equipment and boxing rings. To help people around that hurdle, the company FightCamp offers boxing at home with some 21st Century tracking, streaming, and A.I. gadgetry that helps people improve their punches, kicks, and physical fitness.
I had the opportunity to speak with Tommy Duquette, a co-founder and head of content at FightCamp, at a recent Pepcom event in New York City. Duquette is a former U.S. Boxing Team member with 136 fights under his belt and a qualified #2 seed for the 2012 Olympic trials. He also has a USA Boxing Coach certification.
“So Fight Camp is an interactive home fitness product. We focus on boxing and kickboxing workouts and all your workouts — your punches and your kicks — are tracked by these customized trackers that we developed,” Duquette tells FTF News.
“We use machine learning algorithms to detect all the punches and kicks. It’s not just an event tracker like a Fitbit where every movement gets counted. If you’re doing jumping jacks or you’re just waving your arms around, it won’t track it. It’ll only track the target motion that we’re looking for. And that’s what the machine learning does,” Duquette says.
The FightCamp bag base needs up to 350 pounds of sand to remain in place. Workouts can be streamed to a TV or a mobile phone, tablet, or Apple Macintosh PC. At-home boxers can use an HDML link for the TV. There is a console that can be put on a TV stand or a shelf, and which connects directly to home Wi-Fi networks.
“The workout is streamed through the console … The console does all the processing,” Duquette says. “There are other workout modalities where you get on a machine and you ride the machine. For this, you are the machine — it turns you into a machine.”
FightCamp is offering a Black Friday package priced at $699, which includes a console and four trackers, quick wraps, a boxing bag and bag ring, boxing gloves, ankle wraps, and a heart rate monitor.
Can Smart Headphones Prevent Burnout?
Moving from the body to the mind, Neurable, a neurotechnology provider of brain-computer interface (BCI) A.I. offerings, and audio systems maker Master & Dynamic launched smart headphones, dubbed MW75 Neuro, which are intended to help users “gain deeper insights into their cognitive health, manage burnout, and enhance daily performance,” officials say.
The Master & Dynamic headphones feature Neurable’s A.I.-enabled electroencephalography (EEG) sensors integrated into the headphone’s ear pads, officials say. The EEG sensors “capture and analyze brain signals to generate detailed brainwave data that offers valuable insights into focus levels and more.”
The EEG sensors “carry 12 channels with soft fabric sensors and have a bandwidth of 0-131 Hz with True DC Coupling,” officials say.
The headphones have Bluetooth connectivity, a carrying case, and come in four colors: Silver, Onyx, Navy, and Olive. In the United States, the retail price $699 and starting in spring 2025, the MW75 Neuro will be available in Europe for €729 and in the U.K. for ₤629.
The MW75 Neuro incorporates:
- The Neurable App: It’s an app for iOS or Android environments that helps users “access their brainwave data on mobile devices, offering brain trend summaries and productivity tips;”
- Focus Tracking: “The EEG sensors allow users to track their focus and review brainwave data, such as optimal focus time and the impact of various activities on concentration;”
- Burnout Management: “Through the brainwave analysis, MW75 Neuro can prompt users to take breaks when focus decreases, helping to prevent burnout;”
- Transformative A.I.: Neurable’s “AI platform uses data analysis and signal processing to record and interpret brain signals with high confidence giving lab-level accuracy.”
I asked Kelly Diehl, a public relations representative for Neurable, who was at the Pepcom event, how the headphones help with burnout, which I assume securities operations people are wary of.
“Your brain doesn’t have any pain receptors. So, when you’re already feeling all of those physical symptoms of burnout, like fatigue, your brain needed a break a long time ago,” Diehl says. “So when you’re wearing these in real-time, it can tell you when you’re under decline. It gives you an audio cue saying, ‘Take a break.’ That way if you listen to the cues, it’ll prevent burnout from even happening.”
I also asked if the headphones would help Ops staff members and others working in capital markets to relax.
“I think the whole purpose of it is using the insights to do just that, right? For example, by preventing burnout, you’re having a less stressful week and you’re kind of just capturing more insights into yourself and how your brain works more efficiently,” Diehl says.
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