Samsung SmartSuit

For an innovative brand like Samsung, we didn’t choose to just put a logo on the skaters’ suits. We invented a whole new suit.

The skater’s exact distance above the ice is essential in short track. But the National Team coach used to judge this distance based on his gut feeling.

In a year’s time we developed the Samsung SmartSuit: the first short track suit that tracks the skater’s body posture. Equipped with 5 sensors that feed live body kinetic telemetry to the Galaxy S8 (data) and Tab S3 (data/video/charts) used by the coach and the movement scientist – even when the skaters exceed speeds of 50 km/h. If the posture is not optimal, the coach can press a button on the Galaxy S8 to send a signal that the skaters can immediately feel.

The challenge was to determine the distance between the skater’s hips and the ice to the millimetre, and at the same time to keep the app with real-time data as simple as possible. Because the coach has to be able to make choices quickly during training.

INSIGHTS 

• The athletes and coach secretly trained for months with the suit. After the press release, in no time more than 220 million people knew about the Dutch secret weapon. And about Samsung being a real contributing tech sponsor of the Olympic short trackers.

• Dutch and even Korean sport federations are already keen on implementing the Samsung SmartSuit for short track and speed skating themselves.

• Soon we will find out if the Netherlands will win its first ever short track gold medal at the Olympics. But we already know that Sjinkie Knegt’s results after months of training with the Samsung SmartSuit are stunning. January 2018 he won 5 golden medals at the European Short Track Championships.

• To monitor the athlete’s position on the track the server listens to calls from the unique infrastructure integrated in the ice floor at the Thialf Stadium. This system uses RFID capturing loops to determine when an athlete has crossed it. This information is used to divide the measurements provided by the Samsung SmartSuit into the straight and curved parts of the track.

• Want to know more about the process? Then go to the timeline at FB.com/MakingOfSamsungSmartSuit

Develop an idea to claim sponsorship of Dutch Olympic short trackers Sjinkie Knegt and Suzanne Schulting. Make use of Samsung’s technology and keep in mind that Samsung stands for: ‘Meaningful progress comes from daring to defy barriers. Do what you can’t.’