UVA Engineering Students Under Ken Ono Develop Smart Block to Improve Start Efficiency

Heading into this year’s NCAA Championships, the University of Virginia swim team obtained some special equipment designed to help the swimmers improve their speed off of the blocks, courtesy of Ken Ono and a group of their UVA peers.

Ono, a UVA mathematics professor and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, had previously worked alongside Todd DeSorbo’s team in utilizing video and data analysis to minimize inefficiencies in swimmers’ strokes. However, this time he wanted to work above the water, focusing on the swimmers’ explosiveness off of the blocks. He theorized that altering a swimmer’s foot placement on the block could improve the output of force that swimmer administers to the block, a term he coined “explosiveness”.

To test that theory, Ono enlisted the help of students in UVA’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s capstone course, along with Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Adam Barnes. With the assistance of Ono and Barnes, the students were tasked with designing and implementing a system that could effectively measure a swimmer’s power output on the block, while being compatible with the NCAA-approved blocks at the UVA training facility.

The team of five students, Andy Chen, Preston Borden, Sammy Knorr, Meghana Guttikonda, and Liam Colbert, worked quickly, utilizing their one-semester course to develop the system.

Chen noted the difficulties and excitement associated with the challenge, “There’s already a super expensive commercial version out there, but we were building ours from scratch, just for the team. That’s what made it so exciting — we had to figure out how to make it work without a blueprint.”

“The mechanical portion of our system involved designing the physical surfaces that swimmers would interact with to get force data to our sensors,” Chen explained. “Because the sensors would not be used in competition, the priority was to seamlessly integrate these sensing surfaces into the start block so that swimmers feel little to no difference from the standard NCAA block.”

In the end, the team developed a sensor-embedded sleeve for the block’s flat, front-facing surface, adding sensors to the wedge covered in a clear acrylic for easy removal. Paired with an electronic unit capable of capturing and relaying the data collected from the sensors to an application developed by the team, the system proved to be a success.

Throughout the process, the team worked closely with DeSorbo and his athletes, listening to their feedback about the process, “We had weekly or sometimes biweekly meetings with the capstone group,” DeSorbo said. “And every week, I was seriously impressed with what they were doing. They’re professionals.”

The system was put to the test by some of UVA’s top swimmers, including Olympian Emma Weber. Analysis from the system proved to be successful as it showed that Weber could improve her power output off of the blocks by moving the wedge back about 3 inches. Knorr cited the result that followed, “by taking her [Weber’s] height into consideration and moving it back to position four, she was able to achieve 30 pounds more force by moving it into that position.”

For Chen, Borden, and Guttikonda, the success of the project proved even more meaningful, as the three all share a background in competitive swimming. “I’ve been a swimmer my entire life,” Guttikonda said. “I thought it would be really cool to work on a project where I got to continue that passion and make an impact at UVA.”

DeSorbo also reitterated his satisfaction with the system, saying that he forsees the next group of students working to improve it even further. “Having academics helping out athletics was probably one of the most impressive things,” DeSorbo said.