For people who are prone to falling down, over and into things, injuries are a common occurence. The smart sleeve isn’t exactly built for us regular folk, but it might change the game in athletic injury prevention. Two Rice University undergraduate engineers have designed a prototype wearable gadget that can sound the impending-injury alarms.

Ziel Solutions designed this sleeve originally for baseball pitchers. By using a mixture of gyroscopes, muscle sensors and accelerometers, the device can monitor stress levels in an athlete’s forearm by tracking their range of motion. The user simply has to wear this sleeve over their throwing arm and pair it to Bluetooth either from a tablet or smartphone. Although there are other performance-monitoring devices on the market, the smart sleeve offers real-time advice with its deep learning technology.

The target audience for this wearable device is high school coaches. According to Ziel Solutions, about 60% of baseball pitchers in high school suffer from some catastrophic arm injury, delaying or halting their athletic careers. Two main causes contribute to this sobering statistic – poor technique and an overexertion of the arm’s muscle.

Any repetitive physical activity can be recorded using this technology. This means its usage can expand past just baseball players and professional athletes, but potentially help marathon runners, an average workout routine or repetitive stress injuries earned while on the job. Hopefully they can update this gadget to eliminate all the discomfort out of exercising. That’d be simply ideal. 

The company hopes to bring the smart sleeve to consumers by the end of 2018.