The work is part of a £8.5 million project and is being led by Imperial College London in partnership with UK Sport. It is being supported by Queen Mary University of London and Loughborough University.
Called the Elite Sport Performance Research in Training with Pervasive Sensing (ESPRIT) project, it aims to devise miniaturised wearable and track-side sensors, computer modelling tools and smart training devices.
The sensors aim to optimise training by monitoring different aspects of athletes’ physiological performance. The sensors will include wireless wearable nodes to measure biochemical information, heart rate and other aspects of the athlete’s physiology.
The first project planned has already seen the ESPRIT team create prototype networks of miniature video camera sensors, called Vision Sensor Networks (VSNs) that coaches can use to assess their training strategies. VSNs are already being trialled in athletes’ training ahead of the British summer and winter Olympics.
It is hoped that the ESPRIT project will put athletes at the forefront of pervasive sensing in elite sports and promote its wider application in public life-long health, wellbeing and healthcare.
Professor Guang-Zhong Yang from Imperial College London, who is the principal investigator and programme director of ESPRIT, said: “We expect that the ESPRIT project will make innovative leaps in biosensor design and allow us to look in really fine detail at the physiological changes that happen to an athlete during training and competition. This means that athletes and their coaches will be able to gain an unprecedented understanding of their performance and use this to develop a crucial competitive edge. The project will also give scientists new insights into how people’s bodies work, in order to help them to design devices that improve the health and wellbeing of the general population.”
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Meet the Role Models involved in sports technology.
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Date Published: October 28, 2009
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