Real-time athlete monitoring - the future of sport

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Elite volleyballers using the SPI Elite system

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"An interesting application will be, you will now be able to set minimum quantities of work that the player must achieve before a training session is over, so rather than base it on time now, you base it on volume.

"That's a mind set that will take coaches some time to get used to."

The devices should also prove useful in rehabilitation training for players with injuries: "I'll be in the UK on Monday meeting up with the Chelsea Football Club... They're particularly using our gear from a rehabilitation perspective for players coming back from say a hamstring or groin injury. They're using our current non-real-time device, the SPI Elite, and analysing the data straight after training, making sure the athlete's progression back to full intensity is slow and at a rate that won't get them further injured. I'm hoping to show them our real-time system which will allow them to do it every single run rather than at the end of a session - which hopefully they will see will be of huge value in terms of the rehabilitation process."

Real-time data display

With all this information now available to coaches, the next step is using it visually, both to enhance a coach's understanding of the new data, and to provide TV stations with new statistics and information they can show to the viewer. Enter GPSports' EyeSPI video software, to be released at the same time as the WiSPI unit.

"EyeSPI is purely a software package," explains Faccione, "If you have any of our devices, and you take some video, then you can synchronise the GPS data and the video data so you can hit play on this screen and basically see the video taking place but then have an outline of the field they're on and seeing all the positions and seeing them actualy running around.

"You can have a look at all of the data that's spitting out while the training or game is taking place, so, speeds and heartrates, and distances, and body loads and those things, as well as being able to select any point in time during the game... If a particular event took place, and this player seemed to be out of place you can go back and look at the GPS and say 'ah, look at this, they were way down here when they should have been up here.'

"So we start to look at this technology from less of a physiological angle, and more from a tactical, which is going to make it more useful for the actual coaches."

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