-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Home
The game of golf can be traced back to the middle ages. It began with simple wooden clubs and leather balls in Scotland, and spread internationally through Great Britain’s colonial conquests [1]. Through the 1900s, golf became a household sport and its players began wielding advanced equipment because of the increasing interest and subsequent innovation. In addition, the thirst for improvement was pervasive, evidenced by some of the earliest film showcasing golf experts and their swings. Clearly, players have an innate drive to improve their performance and are even willing to invest money for an advantage on the course.
Analysis of the golf swing has improved dramatically over the past few decades. As early as 1985, kinesiologists were able to analyze their subjects’ swings using a combination of phase-locked cameras and digital algorithms to determine the torque on the golfer’s joints [2]. Much more recently, the explosion of small, inexpensive, solid-state electronics has brought swing analysis technology out of the research lab and into the average user’s hands.
Modern data analytics and smartphone technology continue to revolutionize golf. Today’s golfers can receive personalized on-course training and information through smartphone apps. Bluetooth sensors measure acceleration and position data during a swing, relaying the position data of a swing wirelessly to the app. The golf glove aims to increase the accuracy of recorded swing data by including additional sensors to measure hand movement, providing an even higher resolution dataset to provide feedback on.
The golf glove is designed to be an affordable and lasting solution to these issues. Utilizing an array of sensors including an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a pressure sensor, and resistive stretch fabrics, the glove will track the hand and arm biomechanics that control the golf swing. The data that these sensors collect will be analyzed and used to give training feedback to the user. Essentially, instead of showing the user their symptom that is poor club movement, our product will show the user the root cause of their swing problems: poor biomechanics. The golf glove is a wireless system that can be paired to any smart device or computer using a downloadable application.
The Golf Glove must have an unobtrusive design that incorporates stretch and orientation sensors. These sensors are crucial to the product’s goal of accurately measuring hand movement that will be displayed to the user. The design must consist of three systems: the garment with integrated peripherals, the wrist-mounted controller, and the coaching software. The garment must measure the user’s hand orientation, hand velocity, and wrist motion via its integrated sensors and pass these metrics to the controller. The controller must then broadcast the swing data to a desktop coaching application. This application must display the data giving the user valuable insight into their swing. To achieve the expected functionality and appeal to the user, the design must conform to the following technical and practical design constraints.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Hand Orientation | The glove must determine the angles of wrist flexion, extension, and deviation within a 3° margin of error. Also, the glove must measure wrist acceleration, hand orientation, and hand acceleration within a 5% margin of error. |
| Wireless Communication | The wrist-mounted controller must communicate wirelessly with a range that will span the average width of a tee box: 30 feet. |
| Data Display | The system must communicate its measurements to a visual application that will display these metrics through a simple interface. The data can be analyzed after recording a swing, or real-time with both modes supporting a data rate of 100 hertz. |
| Unobtrusive | The user must not be obstructed while gripping the club with the glove on. The wrist-mounted computer must have a footprint smaller than the average sweat-band size of 3 inches. The sensor wires in the glove must not interfere with swing motion. |
| Portability | The wrist-mounted controller must be battery powered and not require manual calibration on start-up. The minimum battery life of the system must exceed 5 hours of use. |
| Type | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Economic | Cost | The Golf Glove must cost less than $200. |
| Environmental | Weather-Resistant | The glove must be IP54 water and dust resistant. |
| Health and Safety | Swing Form | The glove must encourage proper swing form which helps prevent unnecessary stress and injury. |
| Manufacturability | Modular/Replaceable Parts | The garment and controller must be modular and allow swapping if a subsystem fails. |
| Sustainability | Battery Life, Safety, and Rechargeability | The glove must have adequate battery life of at least 5 hours. |
| Specific Standard | Standard Document | Specification/Application |
|---|---|---|
| IP54 | EN 60529 | Rule 5 for dust protection states that the dust quantity allowed to enter or deposit does not impact the proper function of the system. Rule 4 for water protection states that water sprayed from any direction against the machine must not cause damage [3]. |
| Restriction of Hazardous Substances Compliance | RoHS-1 | The device must not contain substances banned under RoHS [4]. |
| ICNIRP High Frequency EMR Guidelines | ICNIRP | Whole body and local body Specific Absorption Rate due to human exposure to RF fields from wireless devices must not exceed certain levels [5]. |
Three distinct subsystems comprise the design: a glove garment, a wrist-mounted microcontroller, and a coaching software application. The glove subsystem will include temperature, stretch, pressure sensors, and inertial measurement units (IMU). This coagulation of inputs will be physically connected to a battery-powered microcontroller that will sample the sensor inputs with high resolution. After data is sampled, it will be broadcast to an application, stored in a persistent database, analyzed, and finally displayed to provide golf swing feedback to the user.
[1] “History of Golf,” International Golf Federation. [Online]. Available: https://www.igfgolf.org/about-golf/history. [Accessed: 13-Sep-2018].
[2] R. Neal, “3D Kinematics and Kinetics of the Golf Swing,” International Journal of Sport Biomechanics, 1985. [Online]. Available: https://journals.humankinetics.com/doi/abs/10.1123/ijsb.1.3.221. [Accessed: 12-Sep-2018]
[3] Secure Systems and Technologies. (2018). Ingress Protection. [Online] Available at: http://sst.ws/downloads/Ingress-Protection-iss-4.pdf [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].
[4] RoHSguide.com, RoHS Guide. http://www.rohsguide.com/rohs-faq.htm. [Accessed: 27-Sep-2018]
[5] Standard, I. E. C. 62209-2: Human Exposure to Radio Frequency Fields From Hand-Held and Body-Mounted Wireless Communication Devices Human Models. Instrumentation, and Procedures—Part, 1. [Accessed: 25-Sep-2018].