Product Tracker Brings Smart Wearables to Mexico City Marathon

For the first time, 35,000 marathon participants will wear an intelligent shirt equipped with NXP’s NTAG NFC tag IC connecting them to the Internet. This will speed up medical attention and allow sponsors to perform innovative activations.

Participants in the Mexico City Marathon, taking place on August 28, will wear intelligent shirts with Product Tracker technology. The technology is based on NXP’s NTAG IC and the OriginApp* mobile application which provides faster medical attention to participants and perform activations with sponsor brands.

All 35,000 will be equipped with an NTAG IC to connect each runner’s personal data — name, age, sex, blood type, medical records and family contact — to a database hosted in the cloud. This allows paramedics to have the necessary information instantaneously in case of an emergency.

“The Mexico City Marathon is the most important running event in the country. This year the theme is innovation, and in this sense, the shirt is a key part of the event,” said Horacio de la Vega Flores, General Director of the Mexico City Sports Institute.

The sponsors of the Mexico City Marathon (Telcel, Adidas, Comex, among others), have not disclosed how they will promote the Product Tracker technology in their marketing strategies. However, according to Zeus Portillo, Co-founder and Marketing Director of Product Tracker, the possibilities are infinite. He explains, “We can turn a simple product into a smart product so that partners can perform activations, offer benefits, design contextual promotions, announce pre-sales, and virtually anything we can think of to create a strong and customized brand experience.”

How it works

Product Tracker developed a cloud-based platform, which hosts a safe database that allows the unit identification of original merchandise. This is done through an NFC chip (NTAG ICs are embedded in every product or package). With the OriginApp mobile application, which acts as an interface with the database, you can access the information of each product.

Mexicans Aldo Velázquez, Leo Velázquez, and Zeus Portillo founded Product Tracker in 2014 to implement the Internet of Things (IoT) for business uses. The company offers innovative solutions to fight product piracy, control inventories through real-time traceability, and furthermore, be a powerful marketing tool, all of which directly impact competitiveness and business results.

“IoT is currently one of the most important trends that will revolutionize markets in the following five years. This is a critical moment to develop solutions and adopt this technology,” said Leo Velázquez, Co-founder and Director of Product Tracker. By 2019 the IoT market will have a value of 44.4 billion dollars in Latin America, according to a study by Micromarket Monitor.

The OriginApp application is expected to be available in the Android store by August 2016. The smartphone must be NFC enabled in order to use the app correctly.