Going for Gold in Winter Olympic Curling
How a purpose-built curling training brush unlocked meaningful performance data and improved Olympic curlers’ performance.
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.
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