RefM8
A referee's scoreboard that runs on a smartwatch. The clock, the score, the cards and the sin bins — on your wrist, working with no signal, and sent to the organiser when the night's done.
Designed, built and tested by AIRO. First used in a live match in August 2026.
Social sport still runs on paper
Paper, in the rain
Scorecards get wet, get lost, and get filled in from memory at the end. The record of the game is a piece of card in someone’s pocket.
The night ends twice
The referee finishes at nine, then someone types every result into a system afterwards. That second job is unpaid and easy to get wrong.
Looking down costs you the game
Anything that takes a referee’s eyes off play for two seconds is two seconds of play nobody officiated.
Everything a referee needs, on one wrist
RefM8 replaces the notebook, the stopwatch and the scorecard with a watch that does all three and remembers everything:
- Keep the clock, the score and both sin bins on your wrist — count up or count down, halves, quarters or a plain stopwatch
- Score without looking down: two big zones, one buzz for home and two for away, so you never take your eyes off play
- Yellow and red cards fill the screen, so you hold the watch up as the card
- Sin bin timers run themselves and buzz when the player can come back
- Undo steps back through what actually happened, so a mis-tap costs you a second and not the record
- Touch, football, rugby union, rugby league and netball, each with their own scoring, cards and extra time
- Coin toss, captain sign-off at full time, and a match report written for you
- Won’t let you kick off under 20% battery — the one failure a referee cannot recover from mid-game
It already knows what you’re refereeing tonight
The watch pulls the competition’s draw in over its own mobile connection and keeps a copy. Tap the game you’re standing on and it starts with the right teams, the right field and the right half length. Nobody types anything, and nobody hands the referee a printout.
- Reads the competition’s published fixtures directly — verified against a live Auckland touch competition
- Half lengths come from the competition, so a 30 minute game is two 15s without anyone setting it
- Cached on the watch, so a back field with no signal changes nothing
- Scores can post out live during the game, and the whole night goes to the organiser in one message at the end
Every try and card, timestamped for the camera
Clubs are already filming with cameras like Veo. The hard part of automated highlights was never the footage — it is knowing when something happened, and every system on the market guesses. A referee’s watch does not guess: it marked the exact moment, because the referee was standing there.
- Every score and card becomes a clip with an in and out point
- Exports as a plain list, a spreadsheet, or a chapter file an editor opens directly
- One correction lines up every clip at once, so syncing to the footage takes seconds
- Works with any camera, because it asks nothing of the camera
Built and tested, but never yet cut against real match footage — that is the next thing to prove.
The organiser sees the game. You keep the rest.
Distance covered and where you positioned yourself is evidence about the officiating, and the organiser has a fair claim on it. Your calories and how hard the night was are nobody’s business but yours — so they are kept apart in the software itself, not merely left off the report.
- Distance per game and across the whole night, plus top speed and sprint count
- Calories estimated from your pace and your weight, and they never leave the watch
- Coverage and heatmap go on the match report; the personal half structurally cannot
- Every screen says which of the two you are looking at
A referee's watch, not an app on a phone
The watch itself
RefM8 ships on its own hardware — a 4G smartwatch with GPS and its own SIM. It is not an app you bolt onto a phone or an Apple Watch, and it does not need a phone in your pocket to work.
A camera on the wrist
The watch has a camera on board, for recording an incident and sending it to the organiser with the match report. Evidence for a judiciary is the most contested part of a referee’s job — and no smartwatch officiating app can do this, because no other referee watch has a camera.
Hardware is there; the recording feature is in development.
Two straps in the box
A plain black strap for wearing it as an ordinary watch, and a RefM8 yellow strap with the logo in it for match day. A referee should not have to look like they are working when they are not.
The night it stopped being a prototype
A referee with no connection to the project — not me, not a friend doing me a favour — refereed a full competitive match using RefM8 on the watch. She rated it highly.
That is one referee and one game, and it is being written up here as exactly that. But everything before it had been tested against made-up data by the person who built it, and one stranger refereeing one real match proves more than all of it.
Built for a wet field, not a demo
Works with no signal
Everything happens on the watch. The draw is downloaded ahead of time and results queue up until there’s coverage. A dead spot on a back field changes nothing.
Nothing is lost
Every tap is recorded as it happens, so a flat battery or a closed app doesn’t lose the game. Undo goes back through the actual sequence of events.
Private by design
The referee’s personal data is separated from the match data in the software itself, not just left off the report — so it cannot be shared by accident later.
What's being built next
Results written straight into the competition’s system
Right now the night’s results go to the organiser as a message they act on. Writing them directly into the software the competition runs on removes that last step.
Needs each platform’s cooperation. Reading fixtures is public; writing results is not.
Players by name, not just number
Squad lists loaded ahead of time, so a referee taps 11 and the report says who scored.
Needs the organiser to supply squads, and that is other people’s personal data — it gets handled carefully or not at all.
Voice control
“Try, home, eight”, hands never leaving the air.
Being approached sceptically. A misheard score is worse than no voice control, and the microphone on a wrist in wind is the real obstacle — that gets tested before anything is built.
Where it stands
RefM8 is in development, on one watch, with one live match behind it. Here is the honest split.
Working now
- Running on real hardware — a 4G smartwatch, not a phone
- Used by an independent referee in a live match, August 2026
- Fixtures syncing from a real competition’s published draw
- Match reports and end-of-night batch send to the organiser
Built, not yet proven in the field
- Timestamped highlights for a field camera such as a Veo — correct in testing, never yet cut against real footage
- GPS distance and battery life over a full night, which have never been measured on grass
Not built, and not pretended otherwise
- Incident recording — the hardware has the camera, the feature is still being built
- Writing results directly back into competition software — that needs each platform’s permission, and nobody has been asked yet
- Player names against squad numbers
- Referee payment, which is the piece organisers care about most
Where the idea came from
The idea of replacing referee scorecards with a watch came from Naomi Mani, a referee and organiser who had carried it for years and did real design thinking on it before any code existed. Access to real competitions — and the fixtures, timings and rules that make it work — came through Go Vertical. AIRO designed and built the product.
Run a competition?
RefM8 is being trialled with Auckland competitions now. If you run one and want your referees on it, get in touch — early competitions shape what gets built next.