Real-time athlete monitoring - the future of sport

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Elite volleyballers using the SPI Elite system

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Real-time monitoring of blood glucose, lactic acid and pH are already on the drawing board, as are some other interesting ideas: "There's a thing called creatine kinase, and that's a measure of how much muscle damage is being done so if you go into a gym and do a really hard workout, what happens is you get muscle breakdown, and one of the outputs of that is creatine kinase. So before you do your next session you can know exactly what your levels are at - we'll be able to totally determine how hard, or if you should in fact train at all, for a particular modality."

"Let's say you could measure testosterone. You want to get strong in the gym. When's the best time to train? When your testosterone levels are highest. So if you had a device or some clothing that could tell you when your testosterone levels are at their highest, that would be the time when you should train. You might find that your testosterone levels are at their highest at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. If you are able to train at 3, that would be the best time to gain maximum strength."

"We really don't know what's the best time to train an athlete. Everyone trains at the same time. We're gonna meet at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and do a training session. That might not suit everybody. That might not suit ANYBODY - but we do it because it suits us in terms of the timing of our day. Are you recovered enough from yesterday's training to do a maximal speed session today? We have no idea until the session is over, and at that stage we can do a comparison - but at that stage it may be too late.

"As soon as we can measure this sort of information more closely to real time, it will totally change when a player trains, how they train, how much they train, how intensely they train, how often they train, how much recovery they need. All these things are still in baby stages, we're going to see huge changes in the next five years.

Consumer-level applications

While the company is currently focused on elite sports and regimented training, Adrian can see the technology filtering through to the consumer market soon afterwards: "We're currently talking to a health club franchise here in Australia to offer some devices that will allow people to wear these devices all the time - and they'll be able to do total calorie counts for the week, that sort of thing that will allow them to get better results on whatever they're trying to achieve - lose weight, gain weight, get fit, whatever that might be. In terms of that sub-elite, consumer, corporate area that's something we're looking at.

The company now offers a GPS-based non-elite personal unit and Faccione sees the potential for more development in that area. "We're looking into some areas that are less sport-oriented and more health and fitness oriented, which could broaden our market."

"Thinking purely conceptually now, potentially having little belts that everyone wears. So you go out into the bush on a group mountain bike ride. Everyone's internet connected, so if somebody drops off the back and starts to run out of steam a little bit, the rest of the group takes off, you don't know exactly where to go. But because everyone's location data is being streamed back to you to this belt, the belt is actually vibrating left and right, forward and back to tell you which directions to go, so you know exactly where the group is, even if you can't see them. I think we'll see more of that group social interaction stuff down the track."

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