Sports wearables
The Brief
Our client is a well-known sports equipment manufacturer, who had a vision to expand into the electronics wearables market by creating a product that would help athletes monitor their performance and refine their technique. However, they needed assistance in defining the architecture, implementation details, and overall management of the product development process, all the way from initial design to volume manufacture.
When designing the product, the team had to take into account various factors such as cost, size, weight, and battery life, which were significant constraints given the high-performance specification required for the product.
The Solution
A significant effort was made in collaboration with the product team to understand the user experience they wanted to deliver, as well as to investigate innovative methods, technologies, and product architectures that could achieve this exceptional capability.
To manage many parallel sensor-data streams, a smart data processing and data sharing architecture was designed, with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as the primary communication method.
To enable a unique, real-time analysis of athletic performance, novel algorithms merged these data streams.
We specified an embedded system API to support third-party app developers who created the desired user experience.
We were an integral part of the customer team to support unit testing, field trialling and provided an introduction to an Asian manufacturer.
A number of key performance characteristics had to be met through careful hardware design. Multiple RF technologies required very careful PCB electrical and mechanical trade-off choices to be made.
Main processor and sub-system processor choices were central to both UX performance and battery life. Careful sensor choices had to be made to ensure world-leading system performance.
Careful integration of all of these elements ensured compact size and low weight requirements could be met.
Good design choices were essential to ensure optimal use and interaction of a number of hardware sub-systems. This enabled a distributed data processing system to remain synchronised, load-balanced and optimised for low cost, high performance and frug
We played a pivotal technology lead role in supporting the client and several third-party partners.
Scientists, product designers, mechanical specialists and sensor technologists were all supported by our design team, which enabled the synergy needed to create such a ground-breaking product.