Real-time athlete monitoring - the future of sport

On-the-fly physiological monitoring of athletes is developing to a stage where an elite sports coaching box is looking more and more like a Formula One garage, each player being constantly monitored to ensure maximum performance while avoiding injuries. Speed and conditioning expert Dr Adrian Faccione, founder of GPSports talks to us about the cutting edge of elite athlete management, and the amazing future technologies that are now in development. The original MP3 of the interview with Dr Adrian Faccione is available here.

GPSports has been working with a number of elite sporting clubs for around 18 months now, providing their SPI ELITE physiological and GPS monitoring devices to a number of Australian Rules Football (AFL) teams, top-level soccer teams and rugby teams as well as police, military and firefighting units.

The GPS-enabled devices are strapped to individual players throughout a game or training session, and measure a number of metrics over time. GPSports founder and fitness training expert Adrian Faccione explains: "We get position, we get speed, we get distance, we get heart rate, we get impacts from when an athlete runs into another athlete. We collate all the impacts, large and small, and we come up with what we call "body load" - which is basically the total physiological stress placed upon the body with all the accelerations and decelerations that take place in a training session or game.

"We have this being used in Rugby union now. We have a number of clubs that are now looking at scrums and the impacts when the scrums first engage with their opponent, and looking at where the major stresses are taking place, and making sure they have the most appropriate athletes applying the appropriate forces at that point of impact.

"We have some other groups that are basing a large amount of their weekly training volumes on total body load output. So, how much work are they doing, and they can then pull an athlete up when they have achieved a certain amount, knowing that if they go beyond that amount of training they get the re-occurrence of old injuries."

Moving to real-time wireless data collection

The SPI ELITE units have until now required a USB connection to download their data onto a PC for analysis. In the next couple of weeks, however, GPSports is aiming to release their WiSPI wireless unit to allow real-time, on-the-fly monitoring of stresses and body load.

"With WiSPI we're able to stream the data in real-time." says Faccione, "We've got very reliable 200-metre outputs. We've even been able to stream the data over 1.3 kilometres in a straight line, which is not bad. The units are the same size as the SPI Elite, and you put them on and it streams the data real-time back to a laptop or PC with an antenna attached to it. We have a number of different screens that allow you to see the data in real time.

"The real power of this is that you'll be able to set upper and lower limits for a range of different variables for an athlete. For instance you might say "I want this athlete to run no more than 10km in a game. So as it gets close to that we've got a dashboard that shows he's getting close. Or you might set an upper limit on heart rate, and if it gets above 180 we want to know, and the machine goes 'ping' when it does that.

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