I went to a Ubiquitous Computing Capstone course final project review today. There were lots of projects being reviewed, but I was interested in one in particular.

This group of undergrads built a custom-made PCB board with a gyroscope, a three-axis accelerometer and a wireless mote. Their goal was to build a device which could be placed on the equipment of extreme sports competitors (skateboarding, snow-boarding, etc.) that could record the forces being experienced by the competitor. The idea is that if there was some appropriate software interpretation of the data, then a real-time evaluation of the competition could be provided to judges to help them disambiguate particular stunts that might be hard to see. Kind of like instant video replay but with sensors.

Anyway I thought the idea was pretty cool and really marketable in that niche.

Unfortunately, I think that the hardest part is the software interpretation of the data and I don't think the group really even took a crack at that. I was also hoping to see some real data from skate boarders on a half-pipe, but I didn't get that either. Nonetheless the idea seemed like a good one and making the hardware is part of the battle.