Nordic walking is a full-body activity that promotes improved health and activity. Nordic walking is performed using Nordic Walking Poles. Nordic walkers range from pro-athletes training for cross-country skiing during the summer to hobbyists maintaining their fitness to patients using Nordic walking during rehabilitation after an injury. There are numerous benefits to this activity, however from a biomechanical standpoint more data is required to examine how the use of Nordic Walking Poles leads to improved health. 

 

In our project, our team was tasked with developing an instrumented Nordic Walking Pole that will be able to monitor the real-time activities and biomechanics of the athletes that participate in Nordic Walking. Our challenge question reads “can we create better walking poles to help with faster recovery from leg injuries?”. Our project partner is Professor Garrett Malenka from the Faculty of Engineering at York University. The prototyping of the Nordic Walking Poles will occur in Dr. Melenka’s and Dr. Grau’s Engineering labs with all the required tools for fabrication and electrical and mechanical testing. The poles will be tested in Dr. Gage’s Kinesiology lab, which is equipped to record gait data from human subjects and this data will be compared with data collected from the sensors in the poles.

 

Thus, in summary, the goal of our project is to build a nordic walking pole with a suite of compact sensors will be incorporated in it, which will enable us and our project partner, to conduct a biomechanical evaluation of nordic walking poles. Additionally, the sensor suite will be evaluated to ensure that long-term data can be collected while using the Nordic Walking Poles.

 

However, before we began constructing the new sensor integrated nordic walking pole, our project partner advised us to conduct a literature review in order to determine a baseline and the standards that our new walking pole should be able to achieve. By December 2022, our team had concluded our primary literature review. We then began summarising our findings into a concise from to build a clear testing baseline as part secondary literature review phase. We concluded this phase of the project by January 2023. At this time, we named our company “Toureg”, named after the semi-nomaic peoples of North Africa. We also named our prototype design the Mauri Strider after Mauri Repo, who created the activity of Nordic Walking. Moving forward, we then began our initial prototyping phase upon the conclusion of our secondary literature review in Janurary 2023. Our initial prototyping phase carried on until the end of Februrary 2023. The month of March 2023 will be spent conducting our final design synthesis and testing phases, followed by a close-out phase where we will document and present the findings / results from the project in April 2023.