What does it take for the U.S. bobsled team to win a gold medal? Four top athletes — and maybe a couple of rocket scientists.
One of those scientists, Spring Hill engineer Kurt Nichol, is currently working with American bobsledders during the training season leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.
He’s showing athletes on the bobsled and skeleton teams how to use a prototype of the Ripxx Personal Measurement Device — a new sports performance gadget to find the fastest, most efficient route down the icy track.
The Ripxx device, about the size of a Blackberry, is strapped to an athlete’s arm or leg, or onto a sled. A GPS tracker, three accelerometers and three gyroscopes collect data on velocity, acceleration, orientation, direction, gravitational force and more that can be downloaded to a custom software package. The Ripxx software creates charts, graphs and 3D models that the athletes can use to evaluate their performance and identify where there is room for improvement — down to each spin, drop, roll and turn.
Ripxx can measure:
- Elapsed time of run
- Time of day run was made
- Run distance
- Top speed as well as average speed.
- Top acceleration and average acceleration
- Distance, height and air time on jumps
- Roll rate (how quickly you execute spins)
- Roll count (how many times you execute a roll)
- Vertical drop from any two points
- Steepest part of run
- Number of runs on the same track
- Number of tracks at the same location
Popular Science magazine has featured the device, Ski Racing magazine included it as one of the must-have ski gadgets, and the Discovery Channel is filming a documentary prominently featuring Ripxx and the U.S. bobsledders in their preparations for the Games.