The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024–2025
SnowStride borrows snowshoe mechanics for leg rehab — iF Student Best of the Year 2025
Design student Devang Ghosh spots that snowshoeing and lower-leg rehab share a gait, and builds assistive poles that help weak legs lift.
Devang Ghosh
What it had to solve
Devang Ghosh, a Carleton industrial design student, wanted rehabilitation to feel like an activity rather than a chore, and noticed that snowshoeing biomechanics overlap with the assisted gait of lower-leg injury recovery.
How it works
Carleton University industrial design student Devang Ghosh wanted rehabilitation to be accessible and fun. Comparing everyday activities to the movements of lower-leg injury recovery, he found that snowshoeing — where arm-worked hiking poles help lift each leg — uses the same gait mechanics as assisted rehab, from parallel bars to walking sticks.
SnowStride attaches those poles to a wide snowshoe base on each foot. With every stride, the arms push the handles down and the pivot lifts the base, transferring upper-body force to a weak leg. Torsion springs add springback, and a Boa-style steel wire with an adjustment dial lets the user tune how much assistance each leg gets, so support fades as strength returns.
Ghosh spent months prototyping and testing on snow and hills, and even strapped weights to his own legs to understand the user's world. The result, a fully functional and field-tested device, took a top 2024 European Product Design Award and then the Best of the Year honour in the 2025 iF Design Student Award against more than 7,000 entries.
Why it lands
- Finding overlap between an existing sport and a therapy need turns rehabilitation into a fun activity instead of a clinical chore.
- The device's core trick is transfer: arm strength, not machinery, powers each step, so it stays simple, lightweight and cheap to make.
- Adjustable, dial-tuned spring tension lets the product do the therapist's job of gradually reducing support as the leg regains strength.
- Empathy work came before engineering: simulating the injury changed how the handles and gait support were designed.
What it did
The fully functional, field-tested prototype was named Best of the Year among more than 7,000 entries at the iF Design Student Award 2025, celebrated in Bilbao, and separately took a top 2024 European Product Design Award in winter sports equipment.
What you can take
An activity people already love can be a source of rehab mechanics; matching the biomechanics of fun to the biomechanics of therapy makes recovery something users will actually do.
Since then
SnowStride was recognised with several honours, including a 2024 European Product Design Award top prize and the FIT Sport Design Awards' Parasport Equipment prize before its iF win. At the June 2025 ceremony in Bilbao, Ghosh — a third-year student at the time — said the win was a first for Carleton and for Canada, and hoped it would raise the profile of industrial design there and encourage other students to enter free competitions like the iF Design Student Award.
Sources
- SnowStride: Carleton Student Wins Top International Design Award
- SnowStride — EPDA 2024 Top Design Winner
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