Trailsense helps you track your trail skills and bike handling

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We love a new product launch at Kit Radar, and have worked with many kickstarter companies to help introduce their new tech to early adopting cyclists. 

This week we were introduced to a Danish startup consisting of 4 mountain bikers who wants to revolutionise the MTB riding experience with a sensor-app combo that captures the data that matters most on the trails.

This means:

• Difficulty: Trail difficulty based on the type of trail (surface, grade, cornering, events like jump/drops) 
• Jumps: airtime, landing impact in g, speed, length and leader-boards for each jump to compete against other riders
• Cornering: cornering turn degree, speed and estimated performance (based on the type and difficulty of the corner)
• G impact during your ride
• Line choice: based on how stable your direction was and how much g impact you had. A rating for riders to compare with other own rides and other riders. 
• Virtual performance: how fast were you against a new rider and pro rider. We have the trail type and estimated speeds for a pro rider and w new rider and can measure how fast the rider was - both on easy sections and on technical section.

We interviewed the Jan and the guys from Trailsense to find out more. But first check out their kickstarter video to get an idea of what we are talking about.

So guys, so how did TrailSense start?

We started TrailSense because we all felt the market was missing a tool to capture the most important aspects of the mountain biking experience. 

"It surprised us immensely that something like this wasn’t on the market already – but I know that we’ve created something unique that so many riders have been looking for.. We created a Kickstarter campaign to take TrailSense from ‘good beta’ to ‘market-ready’ product." Thomas Kristiansen – co-founder.

What do cycling professionals think?

The esteemed mountain bike coach and former pro downhill mountain biker, Mads Weidemann said it as simply as:

“Being able to analyze line choice and trail performance is a game changer in Mountain biking”.

Sebastian Fini, 15 times Danish XC champion and CX world cup winner says:

"For riders at all levels, TrailSense offers you metrics that can help to improve your performance on the trail".

TrailSense can track just about everything mountain bikers care about, including: airtime on jumps, cornering performance, and even measuring your performance against your friends or a pro rider. With an easily-installed sensor on the bike and an app to collect data, TrailSense automatically detects the trail type and difficulty and gives you every piece of data to enhance the biking experience.

What metrics do you record and how does that benefit the MTB rider?

Our main focus is to give riders feedback on their technical performance. We want to give riders a tool to measure improvements and to improve their skills. 
Riders do like to compete, and riders can now compete on MTB related metrics like line choice, cornering performance and jump airtime - and not only duration and speed.

“Mountain biking is much more than distance and speed, which the majority of the tracking device market focuses on. We want to take mountain bike tracking to the next level and help millions of riders enjoy biking even more by giving input to their technical performance, while providing better overviews of trail difficulty and the ability to compare rides with their friends." Jan Østergaard, co-founder

TrailSense uses an advanced 9 axis motion sensor for tracking every movement of the bike - up to 100 times per second. The sensor connects to the TrailSense app using low energy Bluetooth.

Battery life is kept high enough for more than a full day riding.

All metrics are presented in the TrailSense app and ready to dive into. The sensor also has a built in barometer and speed sensor for accurate tracking of elevation climb and bike speed.

Can you give some examples of training protocols to improve as a rider to improve the metrics?

We will let riders create own segments of a trail and we track different metrics on these segments allowing the rider to compare metrics for each ride - and also against other riders.

Hence, the rider can identify good and bad performance parts of the trail, like "my cornering speed is 5 kph less than average of other riders" or "My line choice is better on this technical sections"

Thanks Jan and Thomas for answering all our questions. 

TrailSense kickstarter campaign ends on Sunday 14th July  - if you are interested please check out their kickstarter campaign and website.

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