Introduction

Tracking your progress while you’re out hiking, cycling or engaging in your favourite outdoor pastime can provide some interesting insights, but it can also be hard on your phone battery.

Exploring the great outdoors can also sometimes take you into areas without cellular reception, which leaves you disconnected from friends and family without a means of contacting someone if you need help.

Capturs, the Sigfox-enabled sports GPS, can provide tracking with long battery life and a button that sends a message with your location to a designated contact.

The Challenge

Provide sports tracking that doesn’t depend on a mobile phone battery

Offer a way to contact family and friends, even without cellular coverage

Allow family and friends to track your progress remotely

The Solution

Capturs is a connected GPS tracker built for outdoor sports. It can operate on battery power for up to a month, unlike mobile phone batteries, which drain rapidly when used for sports tracking.

The Capturs is connected to the cloud with Sigfox. Every 10 minutes, the device will send multiple GPS points over the network, with an accuracy of about one GPS point every three minutes. This enables live tracking, and the Capturs platform allows you to share your map with a link, so family and friends can view your progress. A more detailed map of your trip can later be downloaded onto your computer via USB, with a GPS co-ordinate every minute.

The button on the Capturs can be configured to send five different messages based on the number of times it’s pressed. One of the alerts includes an acknowledgment, which will tell the user whether the message was sent successfully. This allows the Capturs to also be used in lone worker scenarios. All messages are sent to a preset contact, not emergency services.

Multiple Capturs can also be added to the same account to create a race mode, which allows spectators to track who is in the lead and cheer on their favourite.

Here in Ireland, Capturs have been used for walking, cycling and golfing, among other activities. The device comes with a soft waterproof case, so it can also be used in water sports.

  • Golf
  • Walk
  • Cycle

A few uses of the Capturs in Ireland. With its soft waterproof case, it’s also great for water sports.

Why Sigfox?

Coverage

Sigfox is a wide-area network that currently covers 96 per cent of Ireland, including rural areas with poor cellular coverage.

Low Power

Devices use only a small amount of energy to send messages over the Sigfox network, which helps to prolong battery life to up to a month.

Low Cost

Sigfox is an affordable way to send small pieces of information, like GPS co-ordinates, back to the cloud. It is up to 10-times less than traditional cellular connectivity.

Benefits

Capturs allows you to track your trips, but also allows friends and family members to check on your progress in real time through shared maps. This allows them to share in your passion, but also improves safety.

The device has a battery life of up to a month, which means it’s great for a single day out or a multi-day expedition. The long battery means Capturs is ready to go when you need it, whether that’s to track your progress in a race or to hit the panic button while hill walking.

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