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Researchers at Brigham Young developed a smart skate

The wearable craze comes to figure skating
Image: Vit Kovalcik/Shutterstock

Wearable technology that monitors the force of athletes' movements could soon be coming to the world of figure skating in the form of a smart skate designed by engineers at Brigham Young University.

Figure skaters do crazy shit in the air and then come down—hard—all day long, an activity not known for being easy on the joints. Previous studies have suggested skaters hit the ice with a force of roughly six times their body weight, although they were carried out under controlled conditions and with limited sensor arrays. This poses a problem for researchers aiming to monitor the health of athletes and design equipment to better suit their needs under real-world conditions. Enter the smart skate.

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Wearables are slowly entering the sports world, and companies like Catapult are already providing American football teams with devices that clip onto players' jerseys and monitor their activity. The delicate and precise sport of figure skating poses a unique design challenge, however.

"The instrumentation cannot limit skaters' range of motion, substantially change the inertia of their body segments, or alter sensation," Brigham Young University researchers wrote in a new study published today in Measurement Science and Technology.

"A lightweight, low-interference solution is necessary to accurately measure impact forces in the most realistic setting," they continued. "Therefore, we designed an apparatus that uses strain gauges and a self-contained data acquisition system to measure on-ice reaction forces during figure skating."

The result of their work looks like a bit of juiced-up tech from a William Gibson novel—all wires and circuits and blade.

The Brigham Young researchers outfitted their skates with horizontal and vertical strain gauges, wired them to circuits that measured the signal, and collected it all with an on-board device that amplified, digitized, and stored the voltage they emitted. The whole system was custom built to fit under a skater's boot.

A previous study effectively used strain gauges to measure the forces experienced by hockey players by tracking the strain experienced by their skates, but the sensor equipment for that experiment was contained in a backpack, which isn't ideal for someone who wants to hop a couple feet off the ice. The new design allows for the accurate force monitoring of strain sensors, without the added weight.

The team tested the skates by getting an experienced figure skater to jump on a force plate while wearing the souped-up skates. The researchers found that the skates performed nearly just as well as the plate, although the precision involved in landing flat on the blade during the calibration process and accounting for blade flex limited their accuracy and made measuring horizontal stress difficult.

"However, as currently constructed, this system is capable of measuring vertical forces during simulated figure skating landings," the researchers wrote. "Further development of this system will result in increased resolution and accuracy of the measurements."

Pending more research and design tweaks, the smart skate could foreseeably provide the data needed to design equipment and techniques that will allow figure skaters to avoid serious injuries while landing a spin that would make me ill just looking at it from the comfort of my couch.