Athlete

Chew on a stick of gum sweetened with xylitol and you may just experience a cool sensation. Slip on a pair of Carbon Pro Team shoes from Louis Garneau and you may just get the same feeling. While it's most common use is as a natural sweetener, properties of xylitol make it useful for clothing as well. Xylitol is woven into fabric under the brand name Ice-Fil, which is used in the insoles of the Louis Garneau Carbon Pro Team cycling shoes to help keep athletes cool. Read More

Even for diehard sports fanatics, it can sometimes be quite difficult to tell which player is which, when watching a field, court or rink full of team athletes. While this can be merely frustrating for fans, it can have larger ramifications for referees or coaches, whose jobs depend on being able to know which players are doing what, at what time. Scientists from Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have devised what could be a solution to that problem – it’s a system that continuously tracks each player, superimposing their number and jersey color over top of their image, on a computer screen. Read More

By developing a simple one-minute sideline test, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have tackled the issue of diagnosing concussion head on. Up until now sideline tests for concussion have been vague and often miss a large spectrum of brain functions that may have been affected. It is a well-known fact that any concussion left untreated or ignored may lead to serious or potentially fatal consequences, thus the Pennsylvanian researchers are eager to get this simple and effective test into action. Read More

Quite a few people have heard of wheelchair basketball and sledge hockey, but perhaps not so many are familiar with Hardcore Sitting. That’s what wheelchair athlete Aaron Fotheringham calls his sport, which involves doing BMX/skateboarding-style stunts on a wheelchair at a skatepark. Los Angeles-based industrial designer Joven De La Vega was so inspired by Fotheringham, he decided to design a wheelchair tailored specifically to the sport. The working prototype – dubbed the HXC Wheelchair – can be compared to a freestyle BMX street bike. Read More

If there’s one thing that sports fans love to debate, it’s coaching strategies. “Why didn’t he keep more players back to play defense?” “How come he had him pass instead of run with it?” “He should never have let that guy bat when the bases were loaded!” Such discussions could seemingly go on forever, as it’s impossible to definitively say what the right course of action would have been... or maybe not. Artificial intelligence researchers at Spain’s Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) are developing technology that could analyze a team’s performance, then objectively determine the best plays for specific situations. Read More

When you first see the Lace-amatic shoelace-tying device you could be forgiven for wondering who would need, use or even want this product – after all, isn’t that why we have Velcro shoes? But for people who struggle with dexterity, flexibility or strength or for those who just want to get their shoes on and off quickly, the Lace-amatic makes a lot of sense. It allows you to tighten and loosen tied shoelaces and lets you get knotted shoes on and off in an instant…it’s simple, ergonomically sound and could make a job that many people find difficult, just that little bit easier. Read More

For swimmers and triathletes in training or racing, keeping a tab on laps is tedious, but also it can be easy to lose track at times, especially as you tire. Plus there are frankly better things to think about while you’re working out in the pool. British company Swimovate has come up with a swimming computer, worn like a wristwatch, which takes the mental work out of keeping a lap count. But being a smart bit of tech, the Pool-Mate does a heap more besides. Read More

Elite athletes know that training smarter is much better than training harder, and to do that you need to know exactly what's happening in your body. Suunto has introduced its new Triathlon collection heart rate monitors which measure the time interval between heartbeats and its variations to produce seven different body parameters as well as analyze these readings to provide the information needed to maximize their training efforts. Read More

March 12, 2009 Let’s be honest, for most people exercising is a bit of a pain and the following day you can wind up sore in muscles you didn’t even know you were using. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a system that could help lessen such painful surprises by displaying muscular activity in real time. Read More