Athletics technology hits the fast-track
By Ben Fountain, 19 September 2007
Cutting-edge technology being developed by Cambridge University’s computer lab and engineering department to help top athletes improve their performance has even more legs than was originally foreseen, it appears.
Having showcased the SESAME (Sensing for Sport and Managed Exercise) project at a sports technology expo at the University of York last week, a leading light in the project, Dr Robert Harle, reports a deluge of interest from “a number of international sporting bodies.”
Excitingly from his perspective, all of the expressions of interest so far have come from outside the project’s initial area of focus.
SESAME has been funded to the tune of £2.9m by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and is aimed at developing innovative video and body sensor technologies designed to aid the training of elite athletes.
Dr Harle said: “I was slightly taken aback by the high level of interest I received so quickly after giving the talk at the BA Festival of Science and by the fact that all of it has come from outside the world of athletics. I’ve had contact from a number of organisations asking: ‘How do we get our hands on this?’”
Working with a team from Cambridge University’s engineering department and University College London, Dr Harle and colleagues at Cambridge’s computer lab are concentrating on developing an auto-tracking camera system that follows the athlete around the track as well as the processing architecture capable of crunching the huge amounts of data collected by the high definition cameras and make the information almost immediately available to coaches.
Cambridge-based ultrawideband (UWB) real-time location company, Ubisense, is also involved, assisting in the development of on-body sensors that use small, low-power electronics to collect data about arm angle, knee lift, body lean among other parameters. This data will be transmitted straight to the coach and synchronised to the video streams to allow minute analysis of technique.
Dr Harle said that the fundamental technological challenges had now been cracked and he is preparing to turn the technology over to athletics coaches to have them run the rule over the implementation.
The naked eye has long been the tool of choice for athletics coaches, perhaps supplemented by a single fixed video camera producing pictures of limited value.
These video limitations arise because the coach has to use the camera either to provide useful close-up pictures of a running athlete but which only cover one or two strides, or to generate longer-range shots which show more strides but make it harder to see the athlete’s technique in the necessary detail.
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