Thalmic Labs’ Myo Armband Now Available Via Amazon.com

After being available to developers for some time, Thalmic Labs’ Myo wristband is available on Amazon.com as of Monday.

The gesture control device, built by Waterloo’s Thalmic Labs, has long served as a wow-factor piece of Canadian technology, evoking Minority Report or Iron Man-type visions of the future.

And now anyone can get the Myo, via Amazon.

“We are excited that the Myo armband is now available to Amazon.com customers,” said Stephen Lake, Co-founder and CEO of Thalmic Labs. “In addition to the increased exposure through Amazon.com, we look forward to getting our product in the hands of people who are interested in transforming the way we interact with technology.”

While the Myo’s usefulness is evident in the fields of videogaming and operating PowerPoint presentations, the device has practically endless applications in other verticals such as the military and healthcare, as evidenced by the more than 10,000 developers who applied to work with the Myo’s API.

Getting the Myo to market turned out to be an 18-month adventure, characterized by challenges relating to design and manufacture.

“We didn’t fully appreciate how futuristic our device was until we went looking for suppliers and manufacturers to make Myo armbands at volume,” wrote designer Steve Orzel in a blog post. “Most of these folks were used to supplying parts for things like cellphones; they hadn’t met anyone looking to connect eight EMG sensors with a stretchy elastomer that had to carry electricity between sensor pods and fit on arms of various sizes. Most suppliers said that making the Myo armband would be flat-out impossible.”

Thalmic Labs was founded in 2012 by Stephen Lake, Matthew Bailey and Aaron Grant, all graduates of the University of Waterloo’s Mechatronics Engineering program. In June 2013, Thalmic Labs closed a $14.5 million Series A round of funding, led by Spark Capital and Intel Capital.

Thalmic Labs has doubled the size of its Waterloo office space over the last year and now employs over 50 people.

Described as a one-size-fits-all device, built for ages 12 and up, the Myo retails for $199.