The idea of smart items makes a lot of sense, as the ability to gather information helps people make more informed decisions. We see smart phones, smart cars, smart appliances and countless other applications and products.

With an eye on the potential of smart objects, the European Union funded the EU Horizon 2020 project Smart2Go in 2019. The goal of Smart2Go was to create autonomous energy platforms for wearables.

Among the concepts that were developed and shown were smart skis. The ski specialist Atomic Austria cooperated in this project with Joanneum Research and several other European partners. The additional partners University of Salzburg, Salzburg Research and the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center, were also involved in the work on the smart ski via another Austrian funded project (Digital Motion).

Andreas Tschepp, senior scientist electronics at Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, said that the basis of the ski demonstrator is printed ferroelectric sensors, which were printed on a 1.7 m long PET substrate and laminated onto the ski surface (1.75 m long). He added that the entire sensor (substrate 125 µm plus printed sensors 10 µm) is only 135 µm thick.

“These printed ferroelectric sensors are equipped with a completely roll-to-roll (R2R) manufactured, extremely thin and flexible circuit, the so-called ESP (Energy Supply Platform),” added Tschepp.

Many of the components used on this demonstrator, including the ferroelectric sensors, ESP and the organic photovoltaics, are typical examples of printed electronics. The prototype skis were found to be stable, robust, and waterproof, and the technology may become part of commercial smart ski equipment in the future.

The partners published their results in the article “Validation of a Sensor-Based Dynamic Ski Deflection Measurement in the Lab and Proof-of Concept Field Investigation” in Sensors Journal.

The idea caught the eye of attendees at LOPEC 2023, earning the award for Best Publicly Funded Project Demonstrator. Tschepp discussed how the smart skis work.

“On this platform, there is a low power microcontroller and a power monitoring chip,” Tschepp noted. “The microcontroller records the sensor data and sends it wirelessly via Bluetooth to a smartphone, for example, where the data is visualized in an app. The energy monitoring chip monitors the supply of other ultra-thin components such as a battery cell (400 µm), a supercapacitor (400 µm), and a printed OPV for energy harvesting by incident light.”

The sensors gather a variety of information, which can be used to improve the skiing experience as well as racing and manufacturing.

“Already, the bending line of the ski and the overturning times, both parameters that determine the quality of the ski ride, were calculated from the sensor data,” said Tschepp. “The determination of further parameters is already in progress. In the end, this system is not only interesting for the end user, but also provides important parameters in ski racing and especially already in ski manufacturing.”

Tschepp pointed out that since printed electronics primarily use polymer-based substrates instead of fiberglass-based substrates used in conventional electronics, a number of challenges had to be solved.

“For example, components on these substrates cannot be soldered due to the high temperature, but must be conductively bonded,” he observed. “Since this is also a highly flexible application, the requirements for these bonding points are correspondingly high. Another problem here was that batteries normally do not perform very well below 0°C. This was solved by using an additional supercapacitance that buffers the energy below 0°C appropriately.”

As for how soon we might see these skis on the slopes, there is still some work to be done, but there is a pathway forward to commercialization.

“We are working hard on the development of the system,” Tschepp concluded. “If you ask the ski manufacturer, he would like to deliver the first systems to end customers already in 2025. The next two winters will show whether this goal is realistic.”