Taking a swing at perfection
Seiko Epson teams with IBM to help golfers up their games
When it comes to perfecting a golf swing, details make all the difference.
“The smallest adjustment can make the biggest impact,” says Toshihiko Kano, General Manager of Wearable Products for Seiko Epson Corporation.
Now, the insight needed to make those adjustments is available at every golfer’s fingertips.
Kano and his team created a motion-tracking swing analysis tool, providing golfers with a small sensor device that attaches below the club’s grip. During each swing, the Epson M-Tracer Golf Swing Analyzer captures and delivers thousands of data points to a mobile app, allowing golfers to instantly view a 3-D analysis and check key variables such as speed and club angle via smartphone.
Kano knew that designing and delivering a high-performance mobile app was critical to the solution’s overall success
“User experience is very important,” he says. “We listened to what users said and continuously improved the user interface. However, the app’s performance is also important, so we were improving the user experience and tuning app performance in parallel.”
Working within a tight timeline, Seiko Epson’s development team also needed to meet user demand for an app compatible with different operating systems.
“We wanted to deliver our app to market in time for the season peak,” says Kano. “We knew customers expected both an iOS and an Android version, but we also knew that it would be difficult to develop and maintain apps for each platform separately.”
The IBM MobileFirst platform provided the flexible mobile app development framework the team needed to address all project requirements and deliver both apps quickly and cost-effectively.
“We developed our iOS and Android apps simultaneously and saved 30 percent on costs,” says Kano.
Get a deeper look at the M-Tracer technology.
Although golfers worldwide have enthusiastically embraced the M-Tracer solution, Kano plans to continue refining the offering’s analytical capabilities.
“We are looking forward to working together with IBM on analytics with cognitive computing products like IBM Watson,” he says.
