Long shackled by a shortage of training pistes, competitive fencing could soon take off in Singapore and even across Asia, thanks to a wireless fencing scoring system developed by Singapore start-up Twizone.

Singapore has over 8,000 fencers but fewer than 15 clubs. And many of these have only two or three pistes (or playing strips) for their members to practise free fencing, said fencer Lin Fang Yi (right, in picture above), a Secondary 3 student at Hwa Chong Institution. “This limits the number of people who can train at any one time.” In comparison, European clubs are typically equipped with about 20 pistes per club.

Free fencing refers to non-competitive sparring between two fencers and is critical in preparing fencers for competition. It requires the fencers to be fully suited up with a scoring mechanism that electrically detects if a weapon has touched the opponent.

Traditionally, in foil and sabre fencing, each player is rigged up with a body wire connected to a conductive jacket or lamé which defines the scoring area; and also to the weapon and ground. When the tip of the weapon is depressed, signals are sent to the scoreboard. The system is set up for each piste, which is 14 metres long and between 1.5 and 2 metres wide.

The problem with pistes is that there are just not enough of them in Singapore, said Mr Samuel Shen (left, in picture above), Business Director, Twizone. Only the well-funded top eight clubs have the space and finance to install the “Spool and Scoreboard” system required for free fencing. Even then, they average eight pistes per club, which allows only 16 fencers to train. This means a maximum of 64 concurrent bouts across Singapore, which does not work out to a lot of free fencing opportunities, said Mr Shen. As a result, the fencers either sit around and wait for their turn to practise, or they spar without receiving proper feedback about their hits and misses.

“If we can free the fencer from needing to tether to the spool and scoreboard and yet allow them to check for hits and misses, if we can allow the fencers’ scores to be shared socially and inspire competition, we can create more opportunity for training and hence help discover our very own fencing superstars,” said Mr Shen.

It was with this goal in mind that Twizone embarked on the development of Smiten last year. “Smiten is a wearable individualised wireless fencing scoring system that frees the fencer,” said Mr Shen.

Making the transition from a wired to a wireless system was not a simple matter of replacing the body wire with Wi-Fi. One of the key things that Twizone had to do was to make changes to the detection mechanism of the scoring system. In the traditional set-up, besides capturing whether a touch is valid or off-target, the system also makes sure that hits against the piste are not registered as a touch. This is done by grounding the piste. For a wireless solution, just two states are captured – whether the player hits the opponent or not.

Ensuring the robustness of the Smiten device was another challenge that the development team had to overcome. An early version using off-the-shelf casing did not work well because vigorous movements by the fencer rattled the components in the device and damaged them. Moisture was another problem. As players perspired, seepage of moisture into the electrical parts also interfered with the system.

To address these issues, Twizone made use of 3D printing to design its own industry-grade casing. It also developed a more robust circuit board that allows for consistent performance.

On the non-technical front, Fang Yi gave inputs on how scores were registered in competitive fencing, and also on the user interface for the mobile app that would function as the scoreboard. The app also allows the scores to be uploaded so that fencers and their coaches are able to track their progress. In addition, there are plans to incorporate a recording function using a video camera to capture the matches for analysis or for sharing on social networks.

Today, the Smiten device is production-ready and over the next few months, Twizone will be doing field testing with Singapore’s national fencing team.

But the company has set its sights further. There are over 10 million fencers in Asia and China, being the sports powerhouse of the region, has the most fencers, said Mr Shen. Almost all of these countries face the problem of a shortage of pistes. And Twizone is looking to parry this into a business opportunity.