As a blog entry I chose the title Embedded Systems meets
Sports, both of which are very big parts of my life one being the career path I’ve
chosen the other a huge part of my life and my favourite past time. When you say
the words Embedded Systems the last thing you would think of is some running
around a field kicking a football, pucking a sliothar or infact any phrases to
describe a sport. But in fact the 2 are a lot more closely linked than you
would think.
Over the last 10 years or so embedded systems and electronics have
played huge parts in sports science, sports analysis and performance analysis
of athletes. I always remembered as a younger person watching champions league
matches during the night and asking myself how do they how many kilometres roy
keane, ryan giggs or claurence seedorf had ran in a night? and my father for a
laugh telling me they had someone counting each players steps during the match
and I was young and dumb enough to believe him. Now after a small bit of
growing up and I’ve gained the knowledge to understand how both the devices
used in the early stages of sports analysis from decades gone by to more
complex and expensive equipment used now. To answer my first question it was
just pedometers worn by players at the waist, and I taught surely not the ones
used by women step counters that you get in a box of special k? but yes at the
very beginning these waist band pedometers obviously of better standard and
quality then those out of a box of cereal were used to count the steps of the
players and the figures were checked after a match by the figure on the LCD
Display.
This was obviously not a great way to have football players going out
for match having things tied to there hips thankfully things have changed and
now a days these electronic devices are much more user friendly and unique to
each sport. One in particular as were on the topic of soccer is miadidas coach
range. Which are basically electronic devices placed in the shoe of all adidas
products, these products detect everything and anything from your acceleration,
your ability to change direction, your vertical jump, and for individual sports
like soccer you footspeed kicking the ball the amount of times you touch the
ball etc. This data is then transmitted to 1Hz resolution using Bluetooth Smart
technology to any Bluetooth Smart Ready
Compatible mobile device (Bluetooth 4.0 or higher). The miAdidas range also has
a mobile app available which is able to get a live stream of your data with a
Message Rate of 4 Hz, work out memory of 5 hours and a communication range of
less than 2.5 metres in lace position the mi adidas range is more suited to
individual sports like running and the like but can also be used in football
for individual analysis as your able to plug the device into your computer and
upload stored match data.
On conclusion of this blog Im eager to investigate the systems
used by professional teams which take into account a large number of meters to
be recorded with live data streams of individual performance, this blog will have a follow up which will be
uploaded in due course.
Cormac Heffernan
Hi friend, Thanks for sharing this post. I have read your blog. Its really useful for me. If anyone interested to learn Embedded Training in Chennai reach Fita training and placement academy. They give hands on training for all levels of students.
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