When Shea Kewin and Tim Priamo were playing hockey together as children in Guelph, Ont., they couldn’t have known they’d one day form a company to help players improve their game.

The two former teammates are the co-founders of HWKI, which has developed a camera that fits on a hockey helmet. The device lets players record what they see as they play a game or practise, and then review it later on a mobile or computer device, and share it with coaches or other players.

 “We’re producing a wearable video camera for hockey players,” said Kewin in a phone interview last week. “It lets them rethink the decisions they made in the game and allows them to share and save their highlights quite easily online.”

Kewin and Priamo recently took HWKI through ACcelR8, a tech accelerator at Planet Hatch in Fredericton. They have now moved the business to Waterloo, Ont., where they were accepted into the Velocity Foundry, the University of Waterloo’s accelerator for startups producing hardware. HWKI is the first non-University of Waterloo company accepted into the program, and the story of how Kewin got there is an interesting one.

Kewin had been attending Dalhousie University, playing varsity hockey and studying entrepreneurship and innovation. As an athlete who’d injured a knee, he had an idea for a leg brace that would strengthen (not just stabilize) the knee joint. He took the idea to the starting lean course at the university in the autumn of 2012, and helped found Spring Loaded Technology, a Halifax company that is producing such a brace. (Kewin said he is now in discussions with the other Spring Loaded co-founders to “amicably” resign from the company.)

Continuing his education, Kewin attended University of New Brunswick last year to take an MBA, and he teamed up with Priamo to launch a startup targeting hockey players. They began by focusing on a product that would help prevent concussions, but soon realized that area really involved helmet design, which others were already working on.

So they looked into something that could improve a player’s “hockey IQ,” which in turn could help players avoid situations that cause head injuries. The purpose of HWKI is to let players study after the game what they did on the ice. For example, it shows players whether they kept their head up and scanned the whole rink at key points of the game. It also can help players understand whether they exposed their head to injury, and whether they need to make corrections to avoid such mishaps.

HWKI already has orders on the books. Working with hockey programs in New Brunswick, it let players test the prototype and 50 of them (or about 15 per cent of those who tried it) ordered the product.

In October, Kewin and Priamo are planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign to let people pre-order the product at about $165 and up per unit, a discount to the expected retail price of $300 or higher. They’re planning a general launch in January, and have their sights set on a founding round worth about $250,000.

Kewin said that for the foreseeable future HWKI will be based in Ontario, because of the access to resources for hardware startups and the large hockey market. He said 40 per cent of the registrants in Hockey Canada are in Ontario.

 “The Ontario Minor Hockey Association and Greater Toronto Hockey League form a great nucleus and will be validating for the rest of the market,” he said.

Disclaimer: Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support startup companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies and individuals are featured in this column, nor do they review columns before they are published.