Seiko Epson has announced a golf swing sensor that attaches to a club and sends the data back to your smartphone via Bluetooth. The company is to enter the wearables market soon, and while not strictly "wearable" the M-Tracer for Golf MT500G is an indication that it is aiming at the sports market.

We've seen golf sensors before at Pocket-lint, with the GolfSense 3D motion sensor being a particular favourite. However, that fixes to a glove, so works out club trajectory based on hand position, while the Epson device tracks the club directly.

READ: Hands-on: GolfSense iPhone and Android swing tracker review

The MT500G measures the orbit of a swing, speed of the club head, rotation of the shaft and more. It sends all of this data to the dedicated smartphone application (currently just Android), which then shows it in statistics and in tracking images. As with the GolfSense app, you can also compare your swing with those of professionals, to get tips on how well (or badly) you're doing.

epson dabbles in smartphone golf swing sensor market with the m tracer for golf mt500g image 2

Results can be stored on Epson's cloud servers, which will hold up to 2,000 data entries. The smartphone app will hold 300 locally.

Epson will release the device in Japan initially, with an on sale date of 10 April. There's no word on further regional release dates at present.

It costs 29,800 yen, approximately £178.