For years, motion sensors have been showing up in sports and exercise equipment, ranging from smartwatches and AR glasses to basketballs and golf clubs. The more recent trend is toward logging all the data being created by such sensors to help give feedback to coaches, athletes and ordinary weekend warriors to improve efficiency during workouts and ultimately lead to personal bests and wins.
At the heart of the entire sports technology trend are sensors, like those made by TDK, STMicroelectronics, Bosche and Infineon, among others. TDK uses sensors of various types in sports and consumer electronics, but also in automotive, industrial and robotics. (However, the company is clear to say it makes products that range beyond sensors to be deployed for ADAS and EV, wireless beyond 5G, AR/VR, renewable energy and more—in other words, a chicken soup of tech.)
Specifically for sports applications, TDK currently enables its InvenSense sensing technology with tennis rackets, basketballs, golf clubs and baseballs. So far, tennis rackets with InvenSense are being used in pro matches but the tech is unlikely to be used in the Paris Olympics coming this summer, a TDK representative said.
Tennis rackets and golf clubs require inertial measurement units and rotations per second sensors, but the state of the art is going further-- into areas using pressure sensors and ultrasonic time of flight MEMS, even UWB radar. TDK started putting smarts into motion sensors in 2010 and is now into its fifth generation for such technology. The company is now exploring how simple voice commands with various consumers goods, including sports equipment, to eliminate the need to touch a smartwatch icon while wearing gloves.
“We’re putting more focus on sensors and algorithms where you can actually train that sensor into very esoteric areas,” said Peter Hartwell, CTO and vice president of sensor solutions at TDK InvenSense, a group company within TDK. “We really try to simplify and focus on apps.” That way, developers (and ultimately users) avoid being barraged with sensor data. “Where things are going now is building a service around that data so you can take it to a personal trainer or go to a putting green and hit balls for an hour and get pointers.”
With TDK InvenSense Smart Motion, integrated sensors are combined with firmware algorithms in what the company calls Motion Interface.
Companies that develop sport goods (and other) technologies might purchase TDK’s ICM-456xy, a high performance 6- axis MEMS motion sensor with TDK’s BalancedGyro technology that features low power consumption, a critical factor for products meant to last for years. The company’s 9-Axis motion tracking device can be used in multiple battery-operated products, combining a 3-axis gyro, 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis compass with an onboard Digital Motion Processor for processing algorithms.
One of the next directions for sports sensing is likely to evolve into the use of voice—by an athlete or coach—to speak a few keywords like “start, stop, pause, new set, lap and summary” into an object. Such terms could be added directly into equipment like weights or a soccer ball to allow the athlete “to interact without removing gloves or finding a tiny button or trying to read a display in the sunlight,” said Hartwell.
Hartwell said the company is developing voice-interactive technology that is ready to be productized for use with sensors that he called “Wasabi,” which could double as a keyword to activate commands in the same manner as Siri.
“Wasabi is targeted to applications where local, private voice with relatively few commands enables a simplified customer experience,” he said. “The key is, with no connection to the cloud, privacy is ensured.”
The approach would require a microphone and software to enable presence detection, along with a small and low-power sensors converged architecture. Conceptually, it involves a smart mic voice command sensor that would be trained on a few words, but very robust to detect many different accents, Hartwell said.
With an integrated circuit trained with machine language, it would recognize certain simple commands and the output would only be a single integer for ease in processing.
Beyond sporting goods, applications for voice include VR headsets and drones, toys and more. “We are driving the evolution of the human machine interface,including all of our sensors like motion, ultrasound and microphones,” Hartwell said. “The world of sports presents some unique challenges around the size, power and robustness where TDK Invensense is leading with our technology.”