IBM’s Watson has gained significant publicity for its forays into areas such as healthcare, and in recent times into consumer marketing, but there appears to be no real limit to its ambitions.

For instance, it has recently launched a partnership with the clothing company UnderArmour that aims to make its garments smarter.

The two companies are working on a new version of the UA Record app that will assess and combine a number of factors that influence your performance, including nutrition, coaching, various environmental factors and so on.

Bringing smart clothing into the mainstream

I’ve written previously about apps such as MoovNow, which offers smart coaching via its wristband technology, and the Loughborough University based Lumo Run clothing range that does a similar job via athletic clothing.

The introduction of IBM into the industry ramps up proceedings to another level however.

It aims to offer users the ability to easily compare their athletic performances with other people just like them. It will include things such as your weight, resting heart rate and the level of physical activity you undertake. It’s possible that it will even track things such as ones sleep levels and so on.

It’s eventually hoped that the integration of Watson into the so called Cognitive Coaching System will offer a number of benefits to the athlete, including:

Behavioral and performance management, with trends monitored over time and customized training programs developed based on these trends

Food and nutrition management, with Watson’s visual recognition and discovery technologies used to both easily log foods and suggestions for healthier alternatives

Weather monitoring, with the system capable of providing insight on the impact weather and other environmental factors has on our performance

“When it comes to digital health and fitness tracking, the past ten years have been about data collection,” Under Armour say. “We’re now at a point where a shift is occurring and consumers are demanding more from this information. This partnership will allow us to provide value back to the consumer in an unprecedented way, as we integrate IBM Watson’s machine learning technology with the robust data from Under Armour’s Connected Fitness community – the world’s largest digital health and fitness community of more than 160 million members.”

The first stages of the partnership will see the Cognitive Coaching System provide insights in four key categories:

Sleep Fitness Activity Nutrition

The app hopes to provide a range of insights from sources such as the Under Armour community, the academic literature and IBM’s similarity analytics database. Both companies will work together to develop the app further, which will originally be available on the iPhone.