Eyes on the Prize

The goggles are the brainchild of FORM founder and CEO Dan Eisenhardt, who—before starting his career as a sports technology entrepreneur—swam competitively for 14 years in both his native Denmark and America.

“I ended up becoming a mid- to long-distance swimmer,” says Eisenhardt, “so I really felt the pain of not having any metrics in real time while I was swimming.”

In 2006, while studying for his MBA, Eisenhardt came up with the idea for swim goggles with a headup display (a transparent display that doesn’t require users to move their head or change their field of vision in order to view the data being displayed). But technology wasn’t quite at the point where developing the goggles was feasible. Instead of diving in, Eisenhardt founded a company called Recon Instruments that built smart eyewear for other sports, including skiing, cycling, and running.

Eisenhardt returned to his swim goggle vision after Intel acquired Recon in 2015. By then, form factors and power requirements for wearable computing had decreased enough to make his idea achievable and affordable for consumers. In 2016, he founded FORM and recruited some former Recon engineers to apply their know-how to the pool environment.

Swimming Upstream

The nearly three-year road to perfecting the goggles was fraught with challenges. In addition to overcoming the elements of water and chlorine, the team had to essentially teach the device to accurately detect movement and rest.

“The whole engine behind the swim goggles is based on AI and machine learning,” says Eisenhardt. Data collected by the goggles’ sensors, accelerometer, and gyroscope is fed into a machinelearning algorithm. “To be able to train that algorithm,” says Eisenhardt, “you have to spend a lot of time with a lot of swimmers of different skill levels.”

Eisenhardt invited triathletes, fitness swimmers, and several Olympic swimmers—including Scott Dickens, who now serves as FORM’s director of strategic partnerships—to validate the goggles. After years of fine-tuning, the result is that “you just go in the water and [the] automatically detect everything,” Eisenhardt says.

Users can customize exactly which metrics get displayed. For example, competitive swimmers can use the pace clock and track the factors behind speed such as stroke rate, stroke count, and pace per 100 meters. Endurance swimmers can set the goggles to count their lengths and record their total distance and distance per stroke.

Eisenhardt says that “offloading that mental math” is nothing short of revolutionary. “For the first time ever, a swim coach can now give directions to his or her swimmer and be able to empower them to follow that in real time.”

Pooling Resources

The goggles’ data can also be synched with the FORM Swim App, allowing swimmers, coaches, and other members of the FORM community to review and share workouts. “The app is where you really harvest all of the value,” Eisenhardt says, because users can quantify and compare their progress over time, helping them to “set goals, achieve them, and improve performance.”

Eisenhardt is confident that FORM swim goggles will become an indispensable tool for elite athletes and teams, as well as bring together a worldwide community of fitness swimmers. Given that there are more than 27 million active pool swimmers in the US alone, Eisenhardt predicts the team at FORM “will be plenty busy for the foreseeable future.”