All coaches and athletic trainers must attach great importance to the quality of the athletes’ performance: first for the accuracy of the speed of movement, then for its consistency in the exercise. First middle-distance coach (and national coach) to use a Scandinavian method «the intermittent short-short» in 1977 (exercises of 5 to 30 seconds alternating with identical recovery times).

On the field, the coach is often stuck in time constraints to manage his session and synchronize the whistles with the progress of his stopwatch, and for example the 10s-20s exercises are particularly difficult to perform. The SportBeeper’s function is to help the coach better direct their exercises without losing sight of the athletes in action, provide them with any corrective measures, encourage them, etc… There are also the delays between the whistle and the moment we want to clock in, which is accompanied by an inevitable technical imprecision not compatible with high-level sport.

In the 80s, I had imagined an «electronic caterpillar, a kind of hare» with a luminous spot that moves at programmed speed. Technically, the IUT could do it for me but we gave up because of its fragility of the multichannel electric cable and miniature lamps to stay permanently on an athletics track.

In 1992, with two friends, we founded a limited liability company: “CARDISPORT”, a software design company applied to sports training and occupational medicine, backed by an S.A “YMAG”, a national leader in its field.

We are creating the first heart rate analysis software under Windows applied to sports and occupational medicine. Thus, when I met in 2003 a former student who showed me a small sound generator made as part of a school project at a Swiss technical high school, I thought I had found the device I was looking for. After having found the trace of the teacher who instigated the project and I asked him if his high school could manufacture it on a large scale and especially if he could make many modifications because it is too incomplete to be used as it is in the context of professional sport. His answer being negative, I wrote a specification based on my ideas and entrusted to CARDISPORT its realization and marketing. We are prospecting in the Dijon region for companies capable of building: on one hand the infrastructure of the device: plastics, design and hull design (COGITECH) and on the other hand electronics (BEST electronics): board, printed circuit, screen, siren, battery, general assembly and after-sales service on the other hand. At the end of 2005, it was marketed.

But in 2017, the subcontracting companies from Dijon having changed their commercial direction were no longer able to ensure the manufacture and assembly of the SportBeeper, subsequently the 3 founders of the LLC ‘CARDISPORT’ reach retirement age and the activities of the LLC are terminated on June 30, 2018.

However, many requests for SportBeeper continue to come in, which has prompted Frédéric GACON, my son, to pursue the project and consider a new generation SportBeeper with the support of two Stéphanoises companies, Sport Avenue and ClicForFoot.