How to Develop a Soccer Ball That Report and Record Contact

<...contact can me made via foot, hand, head or chest...>

Contact with the hand while the ball is in the field of play, or any part of an arm actually, is a "hand-ball" offence in soccer, and the other side gets an "indirect free kick" in response.

Seriously now, how about high-speed video cameras?

Interesting idea but to employ the kind of hardware necessary to handle the stresses of random accelerations in all directions might change the characteristics of the ball too much. Certainly you couldn't tolerate more than a couple of ounces (or maybe I should say 50 or so grams) else the training ball would be too massive and therefore not achieve the objective.

Weight is not free. Materials are not indestructible. How would you change batteries? And no, you may not kick solar cells around without destroying them.

Your best choices might be reflective tracking dots on the panels and a detection system based on high speed camera or laser tracker. With the laser, however, you must consider eye protection....

What would that tell you? Without knowing the relationship of the contact and the forces involved, where the stricker is, and a dozen other things you have not mentioned, it's a futile experiment.

You will get compression information of a sphere without any other references.

Back to square one.

The thinking is to be able to identify where contact is made with the ball and what contact pressure is applied.......that information is key from a development perspective......bearing in mind the ball will be suspended from a fixed position....hope that helps....somewhat

Oh, well that changes everything!

First of all, if the ball is suspended, you can eliminate the surfaces from around the tie point because no one will be likely or able to kick the ball in a downward direction.

Next, it is not clear what data you are attempting to extract. Are you thinking about the placement of the foot on the ball, or you just interested in 3D vector analysis with range (distance) information.

Perhaps you should spend some time defining what you really want to achieve. Some things you will need to consider is the response time capability of your sensors is you use them. Sensors are not both cheap and rugged. And unless you have taken a couple years of calculus, I don't know how you will be able to handle the 3D math.