Measuring sport equipment properties for customer recommendation and design support

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The sporting goods industry is facing continuous pressure to develop better products at a faster pace. One key current trend is the development of custom equipment and personalized recommendation. Owing to this, most major manufacturers accentuated their efforts to produce customized sports equipment that meet the customers' requirements. To do so, manufacturers must not only develop the capabilities to build a large number of product variations, but must also include quantitative measurements in their design process. This will allow them to accelerate the concept-to-product cycles, while also being able to properly fit their customers to the ever increasing number of products that they will be offering. The goal of this NSERC-PROMPT project is to further preliminary encouraging results by (1) measuring important fundamental properties of skis and hockey, (2) determining how these properties relate to the in-field user experiences (i.e., on-snow, on-ice) and (3) developing design tools that take advantage of these properties and desired user experiences. The research will advance the field of sport equipment design by developing the measurement techniques and the knowledge necessary to support the transition of this industry toward a more data-based design process that can produce and recommend customized equipment that meet the customers' requirements. This project will support four graduate students, one undergraduate intern and 3 part-time research assistants. The results of this project will become strategic assets for both Bauer Hockey Ltd and Groupe Rossignol Canada Inc., the two Canadian companies involved in this project.