Dual Sports wearable MP3 + heart rate monitor

Exercising whilst "wired for sound" once meant jogging with a clunky portable cassette recorder or jumpy CD whilst attached to very un-stylish headphones designed to strangle, trip or both. Many of the limitations of this scenario were blown away with the advent of digital audio - tiny, skip-free MP3 players are now readily available - but Dual Sports has taken the relationship further by integrating a HRM heart rate monitor, digital watch, FM radio and voice recording capabilities into an MP3 player that can be worn on the arm during athletic activity.

The Dual Sports consists of a belt-like transmitter worn around the chest and an MP3 receiver with LCD display worn on the arm via an elastic strap. The monitor takes heart rate readings during your workout and transmits them wirelessly to the receiver, helping to control the intensity of your workout using pre-entered personal information.

Data from your workout session can be transferred to PC and provided software enables the calculation of how many calories were consumed.

The Dual Sports also functions as a voice recorder, portable storage device and its on-board memory is expandable using MMC or SD cards.

Two AAA batteries deliver 12 hours of play and 128mb or for the 256MB version will be available from www.rome.com.au in the next month at an expected cost of around AUS$400 and AUS$550 for the respective models.