Improving sports performance – Part 2

Remember in our last video we were looking at sports wearables? This is such a vast new popular field that I'm going to dedicate a second section on it.

Take a look at this amazing suit made by the company Heddoko. Wearables can be inserted all over. Just put it on and this is the real point. Wearables can measure movement and from movements we can extrapolate the efforts of the applet. Wearables can also directly measure most co-activity, like an electrocardiogram measures the activity of the heart, which is of course a muscle itself.

Here is another of wearable called Athos developed by Stanford University. It also works by inserting into clothes. You can trace the activity of the muscles where Athos is placed by means of electromyography. It reveals whether the changes in your muscles correspond to the exercise you are doing, and whether you are working with the right muscles for the right exercise.

A small parenthesis here for curiosity. In the middle of the word electromyography there are the letters ‘myo’, a word forming element from the Latin ‘musculus’, literally ‘little mouse’.

The BWC ice hockey team uses wearables for measuring the muscle activity of its players, determining the muscle efforts of each player in real-time. In this way, the coach can let the player continue or replace him according to the team's need. These wearables are useful for tracking your position - by incorporating a GPS like OptimEye S5 by Catapult, developed by the Australian Institute for Sports. Basketball players can get an advantage from Solidshots for live motion capture, real-time analysis and receiving instant audio feedback – a buzzer, and video feedback – flashing lights. Once you have defined your personal targets you can evaluate your performance.

Are you a boxer or a boxing fan? You won't believe this is real. Boxing gloves that tell you the total punches split into numbers of left and right hooks, jabs, left and right uppercuts, speed, g-force, retraction time, intensity. Matrix-tracking boxing performances. This has never been seen in the ring before. It is called PIQ Sport Intelligence by Everlast and PIQ. For sports where head injuries are a risk, like football, boxing, hockey and so on, there is the Reebok check light. This is an impact indicator with LEDs on the back of the neck which lights up according to the severity and cumulative number of head impacts, sensed by an accelerometer and the gyroscope.

But the same kind of wearables can also be used for less violent activities, like yoga. Here is a virtual trainer that suggests body movements, records your movements and compares them to the ideal ones, so you can perform yoga without leaving your living room, but with feedback to get you doing yoga in the right way. Clothes with a teacher built into them. This is called PivotYoga. Meanwhile the accumulation of lactic acid in muscles can create serious problems for athletes. As happened to the American Gabriella Andersen at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984. A clinically validated tracker called Humon Hex can also help. It measures muscle oxygen to allow athletes, sport teams and the performance leaders to optimize workout intensity, minimize injury and monitoring progress.

Wearables can even be applied to swimming. As an example, I can tell you about Moov for swim, a wearable recording number and ratio of lengths, timing of flip turns, average stroke rates, comparing length speeds and connected to a smartphone app, to which all this can be revealed. TritonWear is similar.

A smaller and less invasive wearable is Mc10 microstamp by Mc10, Inc. Extremely stretchable electronics for activity which is the monitoring of the human rest and activity cycles. Very important are footwear wearables. If you are a runner or a footballer or a basketball or tennis player, you must have perfectly fitting shoes.

Nike developed the Adapt BB shoes with a breakthrough lacing system that electronically adjusts them to the shape of your foot. But shoes can be smarter still. By measuring the pressure of the foot on the ground and the movements of the ankle, and thus verifying correct walking or running. This innovation is called FootMoov, a new Italian brand. Xampion also manufactures smart shoes. This wearable slab slides into the shoes. During a football match, Xampion can measure the number of kicks you make, the part of the feet you use to kick, how long the kick lasted, the length you have run with the ball, the control you have over the ball. Data from wearables can be fed via transponder to receiver unit, useful for broadcast purposes. So all this incredible data can even be available for TV viewers.

So far, I've focussed on wearables that are useful for collecting data from your body's activities and using it to improve your performances. Now I want to show you wearables that are able to help your body while you are actually are doing the sport.

Kymira Celliant is an example of what we call regenerative clothing, developed at Reading University in the UK. About 60% of the energy the body expends during activity is lost as heat. This lost heat energy can be recycled to enhance performances and improve recovery in times. It works by absorbing the heat from the body and the surroundings and remitting it back to the body, penetrating soft tissues and muscles so to increase body oxygen by as much as 20%.

Another example of this comes from Footbeat. When cycling, by pressing the arch of the foot, it increases blood circulation, releasing chemicals that encourage healing and pain relief. You could also try LumiWave, an infra-red therapy device that provides relief from aches and pain.

So now you too are an expert on the possibilities of sports wearables. When you go to bed tonight remember not just to charge your smartphone, charge your shoes as well. Exercise every day keeps the doctor away, especially if it is properly monitored.

Next time we will look at a little bit of the history of wearables.

I hope you can join me then.

A presto.