Real-time athlete monitoring - the future of sport

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Elite volleyballers using the SPI Elite system

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The next step: pattern recognition to tell us what sets special athletes apart

GPSports is starting research in the field of pattern recognition, which opens up some very exciting possibilties. "We're actually doing some stuff, pattern recognition with the accelerometer, particularly with racehorses," says Faccione. "And it's early stages, but symmetry in a racehorse is really important, and if you're at one of these stockyards trying to buy one of these horses and pay a large amount of money, you're not alowed to ride them, you're not allowed to race them. You're allowed to trot them up and down a short distance and that's all you can do.

"We currently can put one of our units on a horse and trot it up and back, and see how symmetrical it is from left to right, front to back. It's early stages yet, but this could potentially become a really important factor in whether a horse is going to stay solid and uninjured when it races on a regular basis.

"That pattern recognition is something we're looking at applying to athletes - and also to non-athletes as well in a couple of different environments.

"The accelerometer, these are really tiny little devices, so we may think about developing four or six really tiny accelerometer sensors that you put onto the wrists and ankles and knees and elbows, and that then stream data short-range back to the centralised unit which you may be wearing on your back, and that then streams that back to the sideline. That's something we may look at in the next 12 to 18 months. So you have a 3-D image of how your player is doing things. You can start to get technical and say 'did they do that right under pressure,' for instance.

"As an athlete starts to get tired, their patterns change, and a change in pattern can then lead to injury. If we're able to real-time measure that a player's kicking pattern, running pattern is changing as they get fatigued, then that's really valuable for the coaches to know, because they can say 'well we know in the past, when this player gets tired their running chances, and when their running changes they can overload a hamstring - and they have a hamstring injury... Then let's pull them off right now before they get to that point. That's something we're working on pretty solidly this year."

On-the-fly blood analysis

"Ultimately in the future, we'll be able to add more physiological analysis, in particular blood analysis," says Faccione, "which will be a pretty amazing development. Lactose, glucose, pH, those sorts of things. So say with glucose, straight away you could apply that to a diabetic on the street, or to a super-elite athlete that's doing an endurance event."

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