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Could a sensor-studded shirt sleeve make you a hoops star?

Accelerometers and gyroscopes may be the next big thing on the basketball court. Startup Vibrado is developing a sleeve jammed with sensors that gives feedback on better form.

Sumi Das Producer / Reporter
Sumi Das has been covering technology since the original dot-com boom. She was hired by cable network TechTV in 1998 to produce and host a half-hour program devoted to new and future technologies. Prior to CNET, Sumi served as a Washington DC-based correspondent, covering breaking news for CNN. She reported live from New Orleans and contributed to CNN's coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which earned the network a Peabody Award. She also files in-depth tech stories for BBC News which are seen by a primarily international audience.
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Sumi Das
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When Deric Thompson coaches fourth grade basketball, he warns his players about "chicken wings." Not the greasy fastfood variety, but the kind that basically makes it impossible to sink a shot.

"Don't do the chicken wing," Thompson reminds his players. "Keep that elbow in, especially on the release."

What the coach wants to establish in his kids is muscle memory, a physical recollection of exactly how their arms should be positioned to increase their chances of scoring.

Thompson himself still needs reminders, or at least he did. He recently started using a new wearable sensor device developed by Vibrado Technologies. The startup, which spun out of Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus, created a sleeve that Thompson says made a difference within the first couple of minutes of putting it on.

"It changed the whole dynamic of my shooting," he says. Thompson's innate talent for the sport probably didn't hurt, either. But even I managed to make some corrections to my form and nail a few rim shots with the guidance of instantaneous feedback from the sleeve.

Vibrado is still refining and iterating the sleeve technology and expects to get it to market in late 2014. The startup is hoping its creation will appeal to athletes of all abilities. While players new to a sport will focus on matching their movements to good models, President Quinn Jacobson says, more skilled players can use the data derived from the sensors in a different way.

"If you're talking about more-advanced players, they have their own form and you don't want to change that," says Jacobson, "So what we can do with more-advanced players is record them shooting and look for consistency from shot to shot."

So that age-old excuse of being 'off one's game" just won't fly anymore.

Learn more about the sensor tech that drives this gizmo (and admire my skills on the court) in this CNET News video.

Watch this: Sensors in Vibrado sleeve help you nail basketball shots