RecAbility Project 87: Limited Mobility Hockey Keep-ups

Making sports and recreation accessible is the name of the game!

Our team is developing an adaptive hockey stick designed to provide physical activity, exercise, and leisurely sport to the disability and senior communities. It combines the familiar form of a hockey stick with lacrosse net blade and a tethered ball, allowing players to express their stickhandling skills without needing to retrieve a dropped puck.

The inspiration behind this project came from Sidney Crosby, whose childhood keep-up drills inspired our project. For people with muscular dystrophy and similar conditions, keep-ups can be exhausting and the fun tends to stop when the puck drops and rolls away. Our device keeps the game going, empowers players to set their own pace, and restores the simple fun of skill-building.

To go a step further, we decided to implement an electronic scorekeeping system. It consists of four main components:

• Xiao nRF52840 microcontroller, chosen for its small size, battery management capability, and wireless features.
• Seven segment display for showing the user's score and high score.
• Time-of-flight sensor embedded in the head to detect the presence of the ball.
• Rechargeable Li-ion battery.

At the moment, our prototype works well, but the device is bulky, fragile, and difficult to use or share with testers. I designed a 3D printed insert that houses the electronics, as well as a PCB to tie them all together in a compact form factor. This dramatically improves durability, safety, and user comfort while making the prototype look and feel like a real product. It also provides a robust breakout for the battery terminals on the Xiao board (the plated half-holes were the best idea I had; I will gladly take suggestions).