Sports, business and technology are converging in some powerful and very profitable ways.
And a small lab behind closed doors at the University of Calgary seems to be at the epicentre of much of the action.
Imagine swinging a golf club and seeing an instant video analysis that you can rotate to any angle. Imagine superimposing the stance and swing of Masters champion Mike Weir on top of yours. Imagine really understanding why your shots veer wildly off in all directions. You can do exactly that just one place in Canada - the human performance lab (HPL) at the University of Calgary.
Founded in 1981 by Prof. Benno Nigg, who is still its director, the HPL is a cutting-edge facility whose researchers have long been known for creating new athletic shoes such as the famous Predator soccer shoe from Adidas.
Now, the HPL has forged a partnership with golf club maker TaylorMade to ensure that you get exactly the right clubs when you plunk down your money.
It works like this. First, you contact research assistant Geoff Smith through co-ordinates given on the 3dgolflab.com website. He's been trained to run the sophisticated MATT (Motion Analysis Technique by TaylorMade) system, a complex array of high-speed video cameras, special sensors and software.
When your appointment rolls around, Geoff will dress you up in special gear with trace reflective markers that look like undersized ping pong balls. You use a special golf club with its own reflective markers. You wait for the beep, swing and, within seconds, you're watching a virtual image of yourself.
The system tracks your centre of gravity, body lines, posture lines and, of course, club impact data. In a demonstration organized recently for the Calgary Council for Advanced Technology (CCAT), Smith was able to correct the technique of golfer Patrick Rousseau and even show him how his stance and swing differed from those of specific pros.
"This is exactly what I've been looking for as a Father's Day present," said Al Del Degan, president and CEO of DKTek Software Corp. of Calgary. "It's the perfect gift for a golfer."
Geoff Smith is hoping that a lot of people will feel that way, though he emphasizes the analysis is not a magic bullet. "We're showing you an X-ray" (of your golf swing), he says, "but you never know until you take that X-ray to be interpreted by a physician."
He notes that when you have your MATT session, which starts at $150 for one hour, you can bring along your favorite golf pro. You also get your results on disc so you can watch them, over and over, on your home computer.
Of course, the analysis comes with recommendations for buying TaylorMade golf clubs, ranging from the style of head and flex of the shaft to the proper loft and lie.
Golf isn't the only sport that comes under the microscope at the human performance lab. Dynastream Innovations Inc. of Cochrane has been a supporter of the HPL for several years. The company also has a lot of brainpower on staff. President and CEO Kip Fyfe says that of Dynastream's 35 employees, "at least 15 have master's degrees or higher, mostly in digital signal processing."
Dynastream's technology appears in products from sporting goods giant Nike as well as Polar, the world's leading heart-rate monitor company. Dynastream's best-known product line is the AMP motion monitoring devices, which use inertial sensors to give precise readouts of movement. They're much more accurate than conventional pedometers and Fyfe says they're growing in popularity as the North American population fights an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, presumably by purchasing sports-related technology.
He says the secret to his firm's remarkable success is realizing that companies such as Nike, Polar and Phillips "are always strapped for development people. We extend their facilities."
Another key factor, he says, is that the products work right out of the box with little setup, "so our customers don't have to worry about staffing call centres to tell people how to calibrate or use them."
He also believes the privately owned firm is on to something that will be even bigger than motion monitoring. Dynastream has developed a low-power wireless technology that can run for five years on a coin-sized watch battery. It needed it to interconnect its own devices, but Fyfe says the implications are staggering. "We're getting calls from totally unrelated markets like the grocery industry," he says.
He envisions a day when this proprietary radio frequency technology, which is called ANT, will be embedded into the pricetags on supermarket shelves. Then, "when a grocery chain wants to change the price of a box of cornflakes, it will just broadcast the new price to the ANT chips in all the stores."
In his presentation at CCAT, Fyfe moved quickly over ANT's advantages relative to competing wireless standards, which include Bluetooth and Zigbee.
In a private chat later, he explained that he's definitely not going to seek to have ANT ratified as an international standard. "Look at Bluetooth," he says. "The committees took almost 10 years to ratify it. We have no interest in waiting that long to get to market."
Of course, he's up against some stiff competition. Bluetooth is showing up almost everywhere.
The Zigbee Alliance, which centres around home automation, counts companies such as Motorola, Honeywell and Samsung among its "promoters."
Still, Fyfe serenely reports that Dynastream had to ramp up its manufacturing capacity to meet the needs of its customers. Its technology was even built into an MP3 player that allows joggers to audibly check their running pace without missing a beat.
There's little doubt that big money is waiting to be made in selling technology to sports enthusiasts.
As CCAT president Ivan Sierralta put it, people "never let a lack of skill stand in way of buying the latest and greatest sports equipment."
Web Watch:
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(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
