VERISPELLIS

Ara  is a Biomedical Scientist in the Greater Boston area. His training is in mechanical and biomedical engineering. Ken, known as KROD, is an Orthopedic surgeon and engineer who specializes in trauma at the same institution in Boston. Both passionate skiers, they came up with the idea to utilize Nitinol to create a pair of “shape-shifting” skis or snowboard. Their final design keeps the same shape of the ski but changes the material properties, stiffness rocker and vibration profile of the skis. They used their experience with Nitinol from their medical research projects to create arguably the most technologically advanced pair of skis and snowboards around.

Ken and I had thought about Nitinol for some of our biomedical projects, and one day we asked ourselves, why can’t we use it in skis to allow us to modulate the performance of our skis? Being east coast skiers, where we ski on a variety of snow on the same day at the same mountain, we figured we’d consolidate a quiver into a single pair of skis that could handle different conditions by responding to the snow and weather conditions. And as they say, the rest is history, and Verispellis was born. The idea was conceived on Mount Sunapee in NH, where many bouts of ambient, snow and ski temperatures were recorded over different weather conditions. Verispellis was born in Boston, first in our computers, where we designed and simulated skiing on different types of snow at different skiing conditions and carving angles, using finite element (FE) modeling, followed by building our first prototype, testing, and repeating this process to finalize and optimize all design components of our product.