Ubersense Golf: 'Personal coach in palm of your hand'

By John Strege

The level of expertise often found in technology designed to improve your golf game can be impressive.

Krishna Ramchandran, for instance, was a senior research scientist for Citrix Online, working on such products as GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC. His latest venture is a Boston-based company he co-founded with Amit Jardosh called Ubersense, "a personal coach in the palm of your hand," the company says.

It has developed a series of sports apps for iPhone and iPad devices that allow video analysis of various athletic motions. "The U.S. gymnastics and volleyball teams used Ubersense in preparing for the London Olympics," Jake Schuster, a spokesman for the company, said.

The latest addition to its lineup is Ubersense Golf, a free app available from the iTunes store. Ubersense Golf allows the recording and analyzing of a golf swing, with a frame-by-frame slow motion playback, including the ability to telestrate, a la John Madden.

'Tap a little pencil icon and everything you touch becomes a line or circle of whatever you want to use," Schuster said. The circle tool might be used to see whether the head is moving around too much during a swing, he said.

The Ubersense Golf allows for side-by-side comparisons of your swing over a period of time, or a side-by-side comparison of your swing and a PGA Tour or LPGA player's swing from a library of them provided by the app or from downloading one you've found on the internet. You can even overlay two swings (shown in the screenshot here).

The swing videos can be forwarded to an instructor via email or saved to a Dropbox account provided with the app. "The primary use is to get in-depth swing analysis from your coach without being with your coach," Schuster said.

UPDATE: This post has been updated to reflect a recent change in the name of the product from SwingReader Golf to Ubersense Golf

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