 Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE, New York City, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and it's ecosystem partners. Hi, welcome back. I'm your host Sonia Tagare with my co-host Dave Vellante and we're here at theCUBE NYC covering everything, big data, AI and the cloud. And this week is also New York Fashion Week and with us today we have a guest who is really, who intersects both of those technologies. So Billy Whitehouse, CEO of Wearable X. Thank you so much for being on. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Great to see you. Thank you. So your company Wearable X, which intersects fashion and technology, tell us more about that. So Wearable X started five years ago and we started by building clothes that had integrated haptic feedback which is just vibrational feedback on the body. And we really believe that we can empower clothing with technology to do far more than it ever has for you before and to really give you control back of your life. That's amazing. So can you tell us more about the haptic, how it works and what the technology is about? Absolutely. So the haptics are integrated with accelerometers and they're paired through conductive pathways around the body. And specifically this is built for yoga in a line called Naughty X. And Naughty is spelled N-A-D-I. I know that I have a funny accent so sometimes it helps to spell things out. They connect and understand your body orientation and then from understanding your body orientation we pair that back with your smartphone and the app guides you with audio, how to move into each yoga pose step by step. And at the end we ask you to address whether you made it into the pose or not by reading the accelerometer values and then we give you vibrational feedback when to focus. And the accelerometer is what exactly? It's just a tiny device that, is it protrude or? I mean it says as invisibly integrated as we can get it so that we can make it washable and tumble dryable. So I know I rented a car recently, a big SUV with the family and when I started backing up or when I get close to another car it started vibrating. So is it that kind of sensation? I mean it was sort of a weird warning but then after a while I got used to it. It was kind of training me. Is that sort of the same thing? And it's just the pants or the leggings or is it the top as well? So it's built in through the ankles, behind the knees and in the hip of the yoga pants and then we will release upper body work as well. All right so let's just double click on it. So if I'm in a crescent pose and I'm leaning too far forward, will it sort of correct me or hit me in the calf and say put your heel down or how would that work? Exactly, so the audio instructions will give you exactly the kind of instructions you would get if you were in a class. And then similarly to what you would get if you had a personal instructor, the vibrations will show you where to isolate and where to ground down or where to lift up or where to rotate. And then at the end of the pose the accelerometer values are red and we understand whether you made it into the pose or whether you didn't quite get there and whether you were overextended or not. And then we ask you to either go back and work on the pose again or move forward and move on to the next pose. That is amazing. I usually have to ask my daughters or my wife if this is right and they'll just shake their head. But so now what do you do with the data? Do you collect the data and then can I review and improve, feed it back? How does that all work? So the base level membership which is free is you don't see your progress tracking as yet but we're about to release our membership where you pay $10 a month and with that you get progress tracking as a customer. Us on the back end we can see how often people make it into particular poses. We can also see which ones they don't make it into very well but we don't necessarily share that. And so it presumably attracts other things like frequency, duration of the yoga. Exactly, minutes of yoga precisely right. Different body parts or not necessarily. So the accelerometers are just giving us individual value and then we determine what pose you're in. So I don't know what you mean by different body parts. In other words, which parts of my body I'm working out or maybe need to work on? Precisely, yeah. If you're overextending a particular knee or an ankle we can eventually tell you that very, very easily. And how long have you been doing this? It's five years. Okay and so what have you learned so far from all this data that you've collected? Well, I mean, I'm going to start from a human learning first and then I'll give you the data learnings. The human learning for me is equally as interesting. The language on the body and how people respond to vibration was learning number one and we even did tests many years ago with a particular product, an upper body product with kids. So age between eight and 13. And I played a game of memory with them to see if they could learn and understand different vibrational sequences and what they meant. And it was astounding. They would get it every single time without fail. They would understand what the vibrations meant and they would remember it. For us, we are then trying to replicate that for yoga. And that has been a really interesting learning to see how people need and understand and want to have audio cues with their vibrational feedback. From a data perspective, the biggest learning for us is that people are actually spending between sort of 13 to 18 minutes inside the app. So they don't necessarily want an hour and a half class which is what we originally thought. They want short, quick, easy to digest kind of flows. And that for me was very much a learning. They're also using it at really interesting times of the day. So it's before 7 a.m. in the middle of the day between 11 and 3 and then after 9 p.m. And that just so happens to be when studios are shut. So it makes sense that they want to use something that's quick and easy for them whether it's early morning because they have a big full day or late night because they need to relax. Please. Yeah, it sounds like such a great social impact. Can you tell us more about like why you decided to make this? Yeah, for me, there was a personal problem. I was paying an extraordinary amount to go to classes. I was often in a class with another 50 people and not really getting any of the attention that I guess I thought I deserved. So it was frustrated. It was frustrated that I was paying so much money to go into class and not getting the attention. Had been working with haptic feedback for quite some time at that point. Realized that there was this language on the body that was being really underutilized and then had this opportunity to start looking at how we could do it for yoga. Don't get me wrong. I had several engineers tell me this wasn't possible about three and a half years ago and look at us now, we're shipping product and we're in retail and it's all working but it took some time. You're not an engineer, I take it? I am not an engineer. You certainly don't dress like an engineer. But you never know. Okay, what's your background? My background is in design. And I truly think that design for us has always come first. And I hope that it continues to be that way. I believe that designers have an ability to solve problems in, and dare I say, in a horizontal way. We can understand pockets of things that are going on whether it's the problem, whether it's ways to solve the solutions. And we can combine the two. It's not just about individual problem solving on a minute level, it's very much a macro view. And I hope that more and more designers go into this space because I truly believe that they have an ability to solve really interesting problems by asking empathetic questions. And how does the tech work? I mean, what do you need besides the clothing and the accelerometers to make this work? So we have a little device called the Pulse. And the Pulse has our Bluetooth module and our battery and a PCB. And that clips just behind the left knee. Now that's also the one spot on the body that during yoga doesn't get in the way. And we have tested that on everybody's shape, you can imagine, across five different continents because we wanted to make sure that the algorithms that we built to understand the poses were going to be fair for everybody. So in doing that, that little pulse, you unclip when you want to wash and dry. And is that connected to the app as well? Exactly, that's connected via Bluetooth to your app. That's great. So you have all of your data in your hand and you know exactly what kind of yoga poses you're doing, where you need to strengthen that. Exactly. That's great. And is it a full program? In other words, are there different yoga programs I can do? Or am I on my own for that? How does that work? So with the base level membership, you can choose different yoga instructors around New York that you'd like to follow. And then you can get progress tracking, you can get recommendations, and they are timed between that 10 to 20 minutes. If you want to pay the slightly more premium membership, you can actually build your own playlists. And that's something that our customers have said they're really interested in. It means that you can build a sequence of poses that is really defined by you, that is good for your body. So it means instead of going to a class where you end up getting a terrible teacher, or music that you don't like, you can actually build your own class and then share that with your friends as well. Is it a Spotify-like model where the teachers get compensation at the back end to figure out how does that all work? Yes, precisely. And what are your charge for this? So the pants are $250, and then the base level membership is $10 a month, and then the slightly more premium is $30 a month. If you think about how much you would spend for a yoga class, that actually seems like a pretty good deal. And trust me, when you start calculating, when you go to yoga at least once a week and it's $20 a week, and then you're like, oh, and I went every week this year, you realize that it racks up very quickly. Well, plus the convenience of doing it, I'd love having to be able to do it at 6 a.m. without having to go to a class, especially where I live in Boston when it's cold in the winter, you don't even want to go out. Yeah. So what do you think the future of the wearable industry is? This is a space that I get really excited about. I believe in a version of the future, which has been titled Enchanted Objects. And the reason I sort of put it in inverted commas is I think that often has sometimes a magical element to it that people think is a little too far forward. But for me, I really believe that this is possible. So not only do I believe that we will have our own body area network, which I like to call an app store for the body, but I believe that every object will have this. And there was a beautiful Wired article last month that actually described why the Japanese culture are adopting robotics and automation in a way that Western culture often isn't. And that is because the Shinto religion is their predominant religion in Japan, and they believe that every object has a soul. And if in believing that you're designing for that object to have a soul and a personality and an ecosystem, and dare we call it a body area network for each object, then that area network can interface with yours or mine or whoever's. And you can create this really interesting communication that is enchanted and delightful and not about domination. It's not about screens taking over the world and being in charge of you and us being dominated by them as often we see in culture now. It's about having this really beautiful interface between technology and objects. And I really believe that it's gonna be the version of the future. And looking good while you do it. Yeah, precisely. So you've got visions to take this beyond yoga, is that right, other sports, perhaps cycling, swimming and skiing, I can think of so many examples. Exactly, well for us, we're focused on yoga to start with. And certainly areas that I would say are in the gaps. I like to think of our products as being very touch focused and staying in areas of athleisure or sports that are around touch. So where you would get a natural adjustment from a coach or a teacher, our products could naturally fit into that space. So whether it is squats or whether it is Pilates, they're certainly in our pipeline. But in the immediate future, we're certainly looking at the upper body and in meditation and how we can remind you to roll your shoulders back and down and everyone sits up straight. And then longer term, we're looking at how we can move this into physiotherapy. And so as you mentioned, you can enter in that you have a left knee injury and we'll be able to adjust what you should be working on because of that. Is there a possibility of a breathing component or is that perhaps there today and such an important part of yoga is breathing? 100%. That is very much part of what we're working on. I would say more silently, but very much will launch soon. It sounds like it's going to have such a positive impact on so many people and that it's going to be in so many different industries. I hope so. Yeah, that's the plan. Well, Billy Whitehouse, thank you so much for being on theCUBE. And Dave, thank you. We're here at theCUBE NYC and stay tuned, don't go anywhere. We'll be back.