Sports Engineering

Crowd sourced funding for sports equipment

Posted on by Julian Chua

The smart watch with an embedded accelerometer and wireless communication with iOS devices.

A couple of weeks back, the Australian Sports Technology Network had their inaugural conference and it was a huge success. Very well attended by people in the industry, there were very interesting talks and discussions with views from various perspectives. Anyway there’s a great summary of the event here. What was less known was the Sports

Technology Innovation Bootcamp that took place a day before the conference. It was the first ever bootcamp that was focused on sports technology innovation, commercialisation and entrepreneurship. I am not going into too much details about it, but at some point during the conversations, someone brought up ‘kickstarter‘, which is a rather popular online platform for sharing creative inventions with the community and asking for (financial) backing. In other words, crowd sourced funding. Put simply, if I have a great product idea and a working prototype, and I need more money to mass produce it, I then make a video telling everyone how awesome my product is, why they should ‘back’ it, and what (reward) they would get out if they do. The reward is usually the first batch of the mass manufactured product. Its a great concept and there has been many successful design and technology products that were launched from this platform. Quite a number of them being sports technology related projects.

There are however a couple of disadvantages to this method of getting funding. Firstly, your idea could get ‘stolen’ or copied, especially if no IP is involved. Did a quick search and I found a lot of ‘same-same but different’ ideas that were funded on kickstarter, like these: revolights, Fiks & Nori Lights. Secondly, other than getting money to take the product to market, you or your team are pretty much on your own to: first, deliver the reward (on time), then take the business to the next level, which can be a daunting task if you don’t have any prior business experience. That’s where angel investors (whose been there and done that and has the resources) do better. Not only do they provide the financial backing, they can provide the mentoring to make the venture and the entrepreneurs a success; that is assuming there was an innovative and commercially viable idea to begin with.

In saying that, crowdsource funding sites like kickstarter does have its appeals – it has lower barrier to entry, promotes use of social media, marketing by word of mouth, it reaches a global community, and there is a general sense of excitement that is shared by everyone involved. But if you are in Australia and you have a fantastic (and marketable) idea for a sports equipment or technology, you should definitely contact the guys at the ASTN or ASTV who basically have the capabilities of angel investors and they also have a strong network in the local and global sporting industry.

Its too bad that I don’t have any brilliant sports technology ideas (for now), so most of the time I am just checking out interesting projects on kickstarter, hoping to get inspired, but usually I only end up being tempted to back some of them. Fortunately I have managed to refrain myself most of the time, except the one time I backed this amazing sports watch. Still waiting for it to be delivered though. Hopefully it will arrive before Christmas. In the meantime, I leave you with these two great projects that are still open to more backers:

The Oru Kayak

Specta Cam

Ausbike sightings and thoughts

Posted on by Julian Chua

Decided to go check out Ausbike recently with my colleague Rob. I think it’s probably the first time I was at a bicycle trade show, but for Rob, he is quite the ‘veteran’ having been to international bike shows like Interbike, EuroBike, and I am sure many others. Not only is he a keen rider, and knows all things bikes, he also has a bike related patent, so he (obviously the guru) has kindly offered to give some input in this post.

Power pedals

The most interesting thing that we saw was the Power Pedals. It is a Western Australia company that developed a power meter system that measures left and right power separately using strain gauges in the pedals. They have a working prototype that is ANT+ compatible and a decent program for visual feedback during stationary riding; and currently they are looking for partners (pedal manufacturers) to further develop the instrumented pedals. Though I’m not an avid cyclist, I do know there’s already a couple of similar new power meters in the market (or coming up soon), like the Keo Power and the Garmin Vector; and more power meters coming up, just check out this blog. Which makes me wonder if there’s a big enough market for all of them. Nevertheless its good to see new bike technology developed locally in Australia and I hope they do make it into the market

Rob’s thoughts: I admire start up companies like Power Pedals and the enthusiasm of Tom and Scott.  I attended the 2007 Interbike tradeshow where start ups Metrigear and Quarq were showing their bike power meter prototypes to the world for the first time.  Both companies have since been bought out by a large corporation, Metrigear by Garmin and Quarq by SRAM.

The visual display that Julian mentioned is like a dynamic pie chart with each the segment showing the magnitude of the effective or ineffective torque, which is the best bio-feedback representation I’ve seen of this data and will be a useful tool for riders and coaches alike.  However, if it is adapted for head units I think we’ll see a lot of pile-ups in the peleton as riders check out there pedalling technique on the move.

If Power Pedals manage to successfully commercialise their system and maintain a good relability and accuracy record, then there is no reason why they don’t find themselves in the same situation as Metrigear and Quarq…

eBikes

There were ebikes on steroids, a conversion kit system that you can retrofit onto most bikes, and then an ebike that looks just like a normal bike with the battery built into the frame. Generally, they either have a throttle like switch that gives you a boost on demand or they have some ‘smart’ system that detects how much torque you are putting in, and gives you the extra push based on your desired speed set on the control unit. I personally tried one at the Sports Engineering lab (when we had it for some experiments) and I thought it was a real breeze to ride and it made me seriously considered getting one. I mean, I think that’s exactly the whole point of making ebikes, to encourage more people to switch from driving to a more sustainable form of transport.

Rob’s thoughts: Two years ago Ausbike seemed to be jammed full of eBike manufacturers and distributors.  This year surprised me how few stands there were for what is supposed to be a fast developing sector in the bike industry.  I ride about 200 kms a week on the network of bike paths in Melbourne and very seldom do I see someone commuting on an eBike.  Maybe there is a correlation there?  I certainly hope in time that the price of these bikes and retro-fit kits comes down to get more people on them for their daily commute or to just enjoy a bit of exercise without the fear of lactic acid overdose.

Titanium frames

Most bike frames are either aluminum (light) or steel (strong) or carbon-fiber (light and strong) but few people make titanium frames which is also light and strong. I think we only came across one company that did Titanium frames. There’s been a lot of comparisons between the different types of frames and the bottom line is they all have their pros and cons and other than just focusing on the material itself, the overall design of the frame is just as important. But something less known and quite exciting about Titanium is that it can now be manufactured using additive technology and there is already a bike company doing that. This means whatever complicated bike part can now be made (printed) in Titanium, not that it has to be.

Rob’s thoughts: I always stop to admire Litespeed titanium bikes, there is a beauty in the shiny silver tubing and perfectionism in the welding…  So it’s good to see Van Nicholas, which only makes titanium bikes, being sold in Australia.  What I found interesting about this Dutch company is their frames carry a lifetime warranty and the warranty can be transferred to another owner after a re-certification procedure.   I’m not sure whether this perk is offered by carbon frame manufacturers?

Anyway, that’s about it. I know it’s not as much compared to what can be seen or talked about at interbike or eurobike. But the  truth is Ausbike only had 138 exhibitors while Eurobike had 1250 and Interbike had 1235, that’s close to 10 times more exhibitors; to be fair, Interbike started since 1982, Eurobike had been around since 1991 while Ausbike only had 3 preceding events. So given a bit of time, with the growing market and interest in cycling in the southern hemisphere, I’m sure Ausbike will become massive. In the meantime, what do you think will be the next big thing in bike technology or rather what do you think is worth developing?

Wheelchair Rugby: First Paralympic Gold and some Breakthrough Research

Posted on by Julian Chua

Photo from the London 2012 website

The Wheelchair Steelers (Australian Wheelchair Rugby team) recently won the much coveted gold medal at the London 2012 Paralympics. The Steelers have been aiming for this gold medal since the 2008 Beijing Paralympic games where they got silver. Over the past 4 years, the coach and team have been working hard to hone their skills, establish training centres and at the same time attract new talent. There has been year round trainings and competitions, international ones such as the 2010 WWRC, and locally, there’s the annual National League, and annual State League in Victoria. Organisations such as the Disability Sport & Recreation have also been promoting the sport through programs and social media to encourage more people to try out the game.

On the research side of things, there has been a couple of studies conducted at the RMIT Sportzedge program with support from some of the Australian wheelchair rugby athletes and coach:

1) Customisation of rugby wheelchairs for performance – The idea of performance based customisation is to maximise the athletes’ comfort and performance through adjusting a few key parameters of the wheelchair design and finding the optimum setup. The main experiments were designed after much research and field tests were done and this was of course coupled with feedback from the athletes and coach. In the end, a platform was developed that allows athletes of the various classifications to systematically customise their individual wheelchair that not only feels good but also helps the athletes perform. For a video on the wheelchair customisation research, check out Channel Ten’s program Scope where it was featured in an episode on Science in Sports.

Ergometer Tests with the Wheelchair Rig

2) Performance & match analysis of wheelchair rugby athletes using inertial sensors – Match analysis of wheelchair rugby was motivated by the fact that the only option available currently is video software analysis, and even though inertial sensors are so commonly used in other able-bodied team sports, it hasn’t been applied in wheelchair sports. The challenge however is to use the kinematic data for activity identification, and not just for measuring speeds and accelerations. The final outcome would be to use the likes of smart phones that are embedded with MEMS sensors and are programmable, mount them on the rugby wheelchairs during competition, and run apps that can determine and track the various activities and performance. Ultimately, this could assist the coach in monitoring the athletes’ performance or even be used for disability classification studies.

Below’s a list of publications that resulted from related work done in the past 3 years. Most of them were presented at the previous ISEA and APCST conferences as well:

Although most of these work were focused on wheelchair rugby, the concepts and platforms developed could potentially be applied to other wheelchair sports for user optimised wheelchair designs and for monitoring activity & performance.