Real-time athlete monitoring - the future of sport

A-

A+

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Elite volleyballers using the SPI Elite system

Image Gallery ( 15 images )

Dealing with the privacy issue

While it's clear that any elite sports team would gain significant advantage from the use of this sort of technology, Faccione has found the concept has met some resistance. He anticipates that many teams might have an issue with making such detailed physiological and positional data available to the media and opposition teams: "For us that's something that needs to be discussed between the clubs and the broadcasters.

"At the moment, the statistics companies that are out there anyway supply the data to all the clubs... so it's quite an even playing field, even though they like to think they've got secrets from everyone else. Doing smart things with the analysis during training, that's where the difference takes place. As I said, any club can get really advanced statistics and details about their opponent prior to playing them.

"That's exactly what happened with the Broncos and Melbourne Storm last year. The Broncos did some great analysis on what the Storm's were good at and not good at, and went into the grand final and ended up winning quite easily, and that was based on statistics they had access to.

"All we want to do is now offer some other information that's going to allow them to make even better decisions about whether a player should or shouldn't stay on the field or be swapped or substituted for a fresher player.

"We'd like to say that we think this will actually lead to better safety for players. Our technology could potentially be able to tell if a player started to run out of steam, started to have an imbalance of one sort or another with a leg that might lead to a particular injury.... If a player had really maxed out with their heart rate; there's a whole range of things we can stream back to ensure that a player stays safe and well rather than being out on the field until such a time as they get themselves injured.

"This will allow people to stay elite athletes for a lot longer. Already you can see the average age of a football player. 20 years ago it used to be early 20s, now now it's late 20s, early 30s. And we'll soon see that through advances in better monitoring players will be able to stay in the sport into their late 30s and early 40s. All the physiology tells you that players don't need to lose anything into their late 30s and into their 40s.

"What generally stops them is that they get too injured and too broken down due to incorrect training patterns and methods, and they have to drop out of the sport from injury. If you can keep them relatively injury free, their careers can be longer. I think we'll see athletes getting older and older as well, which is not a bad thing."

...continued

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6