Evaluation Progress

Dear all,

here is an update on the progress regarding the evaluation of the Sudden Impact Challenge devices.

After the shipments have arrived at Leeds Beckett University last week and after all the related shipping issues have been solved (I am already dreading the process of shipping those back,...not sure what kind of problems will await then!), we finally had set the date for the unboxing to 19 June.

In the morning at 9:00 the video team from Premier Farnell in Leeds had arrived, and we brought the boxes into the Biomechanics Lab in the Carnegie Faculty. There all of our evaluating team assembled and discussed how to proceed regarding the opening and the filming, so as to record those precious moments when we for the first time would see the devices for the very first time.

We have received 6 devices in 5 packages - two of the devices had been sent together in one single shipment, whereas all the other ones were sent separately.

With great amazement we opened the boxes and saw the actual devices which so far we only had seen on the notes and descriptions. We checked for completeness of the items as in the descriptions, and everything seems to be there.

Pictures taken by the video team have already been posted, and I will soon also post a few ones that I took.

This opening and filming took about two hours on Friday morning.

Then in the afternoon Julian and myself began to startup the devices in our own computing labs to check if they are working as described. This took longer than expected, as there is a large variety of different communication methods and software for each device. We continued on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning. So far we had success with 4 of the 6 devices to get them up and running, and we are in contact with the developers of the two devices which we have not yet been able to run in their intended mode. We did admire greatly the various approaches and the ingenuity of each developer in addressing the Challenge, and we were very impressed with what everybody has developed.

On Wednesday evening we brought the four functioning devices into the Biomechanics Lab, where Joanne and Michael from the Carnegie Faculty had a go in examining the devices from their own perspective of usability in sports. We jotted down a few notes, and will do a more formal examination in the next few weeks.

Since the lab is not always available and since our evaluation team has some other obligations and will also be on vacation during the next weeks, we can go on with the evaluation only at a moderate pace. But we will complete the evaluation latest by 17 July, because this is a hard deadline for us at Leeds Beckett: the following week is Graduation Week, and the facilities will no longer be available for the testing.

I will provide further updates on the evaluation progress, but will not provide specific details on the results, as this will be done only in the final evaluation report.

Reinhold