Golf is one of the most popular sports worldwide. In 2013, the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) estimated over 26 million golfers only in the United States of America (USA). Amongst the several movements in golf, the putting is considered as the most vital ability to master by PGA, representing about 43% of the strokes in a golf game.
Ingeniarius brings an innovative device designed to provide professional analysis around the putting – not only to “tune” the performance of professional athletes, but also to promote this modality within the context of learning, training and competition.
Whether you are a golf expert, or just starting out, InPutter gives you the knowledge you need to improve your putting by acquiring all relevant data during the gesture.
InPutter is able to compute the most relevant process variables inherent to the putting gesture, thus providing, in real-time and over the internet, raw and preprocessed data by benefiting from state-of-the-art methods. If you are looking for some reading about these methods, we’ve prepared a small selection of scientific articles from our team that you may check out here.
Take a glance at InPutter‘s features below.
But still, this is not all InPutter is capable of.
More than just acquisition rate and energy autonomy, InPutter aims for accuracy, precision and quantity of information around the putting performance. As most alternatives available in the market, a particular attention has been given to the position, velocity and acceleration of the putter. Nevertheless, most alternatives focus on specific properties of such process variables, namely the amplitude, period, maximum or minimum values. However, those variables are directly related with the human movement and, as biological processes, the analysis should consider the overall information over time. Besides traditional measures of process performance, InPutter additionally provides insights never considered before in any device available in the market to analyze the golf putting. Namely, how certain variables vary during the execution of the gesture and how those can be mathematically represented for post-processing techniques one may wish to apply (e.g., classification methods to assess athlete’s putting signature). Those variables comprise the angular position and the linear acceleration of the putter, which are retrieved using Kalman filtering algorithms, followed by the mathematical representation of both angular and linear positions of the putter, benefiting from the Levenberg-Marquardt technique to find the best fit.
This seems like a lot of information right? Now imagine yourself looking for the one about a specific putting you did over a whole golf game, in which you never turned InPutter off – catastrophic right? Luckily, InPutter uses a real-time probabilistic fuzzy classification method to accurately identify puttings; even if you decide to start dancing or catch some flies with it.
To sum it up, InPutter will revolutionize the putting analysis market in many ways. Generally speaking, this is how we stack up to our competitors:
There are a few other minor features that were not included in the benchmarking. Yet, the previous table clearly shows that SAM PuttLab is the only one able to compete against InPutter. However, despite the significant improvements made in its latest version, which allows to interact with an iOS app (exclusive to iPhones), the experimental setup still requires installing a sensor on the putter to transmit ultrasonic signals to a receiving unit which, on the other hand, has to be placed 1.5 meters in front of the athlete at each putting. This initial setup is followed by a semi-manual calibration process, which needs to be carried out whenever the software is initialized. Additionally, the receiving unit requires power over USB and does not possess any storage capacity, thus requiring a persistent physical connection to a computer/laptop during the data acquisition. But, if you are still willing to have all that work to transport, assemble and calibrate the setup each time you want to putt, then check the cost: SAM PuttLab is about 4 x more expensive than InPutter.
As if these specs weren’t enough, InPutter includes a heartbeat radio-frequency receiver, compatible with Polar electrocardiogram (ECG) transmitters. All InPutter perks included in this campaign already come with the T31 coded™ transmitter – just place it in your chest and the band will start transmitting your heart rate to your InPutter, which will thereafter filter any noise using a fractional-order estimation method to provide accurate readings in the cloud.
“InPutter came to revolutionize the putting learning, training and understanding. It is an essential ground-breaking tool for all golfers.” – Prof. Gonçalo Dias, Ph.d. in Sports Sciences.
Prof. Gonçalo Dias is currently a professor of motor control and a member of the scientific committee at the Faculty of Sports Sciences and Physical Education from University of Coimbra, Portugal. Over the past 5 years, he has been conducting scientific research on several areas associated to sports and health, namely physical activity among older adults, motor control, sport sciences, and others. Additionally, he is what we can truly call a “golf scientist” – although he is not that of a terrific player [laughs], he has more than 15 scientific articles only around the golf putting in top journals, conferences and book chapters. In spite of this, and given the co-authorship of Ingeniarius’ CEO in many of these works, Prof. Gonçalo Dias is the main evaluator of InPutter within both research and professional contexts.
“I strongly recommend InPutter to all golfers who wish to optimize their putting. It can be easily transported to any place, barely requires any configuration and provides reliable information about the putting performance. In the green, InPutter can be the best “friend” a golfer may have.” – Hugo Espírito Santo, European Pitch & Putt Champion.
While Gonçalo is all about science, Hugo Espírito Santo is all about playing golf. He has been the #1 golfer in the International Pitch & Putt Association (IPPA) ranking. He has been five-time Iberian Champion around the pitch & putt and one of the expert golfers most widely known worldwide. Hugo Espírito Santo‘s expertise, as a golfer, has been vital to maintain InPutter ecologically valid, without compromising the putting performance.
“Now that technology is hand in hand with sports, I see InPutter as the key to achieve optimum performance on the green. The feedback provided is very accurate and InPutter’s interface is intuitive, thus allowing the golfer to easily improve his putt.” – Nuno Barreto, Director of Quinta das Lágrimas Golf Academy (Coimbra, Portugal).
Besides being Director of Quinta das Lágrimas Golf Academy, Nuno Barreto plays and teaches golf for almost two decades now. As such, he knows exactly what are the variables one should look at, and the ones InPutter should be able to provide. The graphical user interface has received Nuno Barreto‘s input more often than we can count, so as to keep the desired user-centered design we’ve been aiming at.
