When Professor Gerry Sande, an experienced curling coach, needed a way to turn physically demanding sports skills into quantifiable performance data, he turned to PPS, a tactile sensing company, who developed a smart training brush. The brush’s embedded pressure sensors allowed Sande to measure an athlete’s sweeping efficiency, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and facilitating technique improvements. The collaboration on the purpose-built curling brush contributed to Olympic and World Championship success.
Curling is a sport that continues to grow in popularity. While it is widely recognized through the Winter Olympics, it has long had its own dedicated World Championships, with national and international competitions established well before curling became an Olympic sport. Therefore, it came as little surprise when World Curling announced in late 2025 that, from Season 2026–2027, “the World Men’s and World Women’s Curling Championships will expand from 13 to 18 teams.”
As the sport continues to reach new audiences and attract more players than ever, it is only natural that the athletic level and sporting performance of players continue to rise.
A Curling Coach’s Challenge
Sande Curling was founded by Sande, a nationally certified curling coach and academic who holds multiple curling-related patents and has coached and worked with many Olympic and World Champion curling teams.
In the early 2010s, Sande began exploring how to objectively measure sweeping efficiency and how this can be used to improve technique. He wanted increased insight into factors such as downward force, sweeping cycles per second, performance efficiency over time, fatigue-related power loss and technique consistency, but the technology required to reliably measure them had not yet been developed.
Believing the solution could lie in pressure sensing, Sande researched the technology online. He realized that PPS’ high resolution repeatable pressure sensor arrays, supported by synchronized video and data capture, offered the precision he required.
Working together from January 2013, the cooperation resulted in a system capable of providing detailed analysis of sweeping performance, including how and where athletes apply pressure, as well as how efficiency changes with fatigue.
Unlocking Sweeping Performance Data
The curling training brush is underpinned by PPS’ DigiTacts™ thin-film pressure sensor arrays. PPS integrated the sensors into the brush and provided Sande with Bluetooth transmission hardware, data capture and visualization software, as well as remote training and technical support to enable effective deployment and meaningful use of the data.
DigiTacts is a compact, high-sensitivity tactile sensor designed to measure applied pressure and contact forces with exceptional resolution. This makes it ideal for capturing the subtle, but significant, variations generated during curling sweeping.
To integrate the technology into the curling brush, a slot was cut into the brush head so the sensor tail and cable could be routed internally. The sensor tail was fixed at a 90-degree angle to the plate edge, allowing the electronics to sit securely inside the brush head. This ensured the sensor remained stable for accurate measurement while also protecting it from impact, moisture, snow, and debris during on-ice testing. The system also synchronized pressure data with video footage, enabling detailed performance analysis and remains fully operational more than a decade later.
Here, DigiTacts measures force via an array of pressure sensors while also capturing sweeping frequency. This data is streamed wirelessly to a laptop, with live video footage and force traces synchronized directly on screen.
The technology makes it possible to identify where declines in performance are fatigue-driven, supporting long-term analysis of an athlete’s stamina and efficiency. It also allows coaches to compare a team’s sweepers, informing role placement and training focus.
Under test, the training brush revealed performance characteristics that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. For example, the data gathered for a Swedish player under test showed the athlete lost pressure on every fifth stroke.
This insight allowed coaches to adjust the player’s footwork and improve his technique, helping increase efficiency by as much as 50 percent. The data also provided a powerful indicator of stamina, helping teams understand how much sweeping performance declined during sustained effort and how targeted conditioning could reduce that drop-off.
“There are two electrodes for each array of sensors and as you exert pressure the distance between these two electrodes change — that tells you how much pressure is applied,” explained Sande. “The system is sophisticated and gives you a very detailed analysis.”
From Performance Data to Winning Success
Sande has put the training brush developed with PPS to use for more than a decade. It has been applied in a wide range of contexts, from elite performance testing to national team environments. Under his supervision, the PPS brush has been used to assess and refine technique in teams and athletes who have gone on to win national championships and Olympic medals, with those performance gains ultimately applied in elite-level competition using standard equipment.
He quickly found that the ability to correct sweeping technique, improve force consistency, quantify the effects of fatigue, as well as understand individual strengths and weaknesses provided a significant performance advantage. In fact, the system has been used by teams who went on to win Olympic gold medals and World Championship titles.
“Success and failure in elite-level curling often comes down to a matter of millimetres, so what might seem like small improvements in player performance can make a huge difference on results on the ice,” Sande explained.
“We saw our work with Sande on the curling training brush project as a chance to use tactile data to understand contact mechanics and make a genuine impact, helping to raise performance levels as the sport continues to grow,” reflected Dr. Jae Son, CEO and Founder of PPS.
This article was contributed by PPS (Glasgow, U.K). For more information, visit www.pressureprofile.com .
