Improving sports performance through wearables

Today, I would like to tell you about sports wearables. Why use wearables for sports? For a number of fundamental reasons. To evaluate performances, to increase performances, to increase the athlete’s safety, to gather data for casting and many other possibilities.

Let’s start by considering this one- Move It produced by a start-up called Captiks Enterprise. Move It houses different sensors in tiny blocks to measure the performances of the wearer in terms of acceleration, velocity, rotation, energy, and power efforts and even the impact of shocks on ligaments. You can place as many of these wearables as you want on any part of your body. It all depends on your objectives. Collecting data from such wearables can make the difference in competitions. For injury prevention and shortening recovery times, you get to know whether you are pushing too hard but in an objective way and not based upon the way you are feeling or whether or not you are recovering well from the previous effort. And how your body is responding to a particular exercise.

Bologna Football Club in Italy cleared its injury table with this technology and another five-a-side team called Arquis Sabore as a result was able to win the National Championship and the Italian Cup.

How about ice skating? Ice skates can be very different, one from the other, and the best ice skates are those where you use the shock to your knees as much as possible, but how do you choose them? Wearables have the answer. And with wearables, we can compare the performances of different ice skates and changes to the training regime. On the left and the right of the video, you have the same soccer player before and after the training session. Variables can gather data, send it to the computer where you can view it with augmented reality superimposed on the athlete in real-time. The coach will use such data to adapt the training session accordingly.

Dancers can also benefit form wearables. Here is a professional dancer. The human eye cannot catch every single movement during a dance lecture, even an expert coach can lose some basic details. Wearables, however, record date from which artificial intelligence algorithms can provide fundamental information like subtle tremors in the body, bending of small joints and little asymmetries that can make all the difference in a competition. 

These wearables make you feel part of the game. You really can get the same sensation as the players during the match. You can feel the acceleration, the impacts, the shocks, and vibrations that your favourite players feel. It is called haptic technology- interaction involving touch. 

Do you like motorsports? Did you know that a racing car driver expends a lot of energy during a race resulting in reduced motor reflexes during the final minutes? This is due to defective postures from natural movements such as medical body balancing, excessive load on elbows and shoulders and so on. How do you solve this? By wearing wearables to collect data during simulated races. The data can be used to improve the driving position and their performance in the race by correcting the placement of the seat, the footwell and the peddles and the measurements of the driver once the position has been changed and then again and again until you obtain maximum efficiency for minimum efforts. Have I mentioned your favourite sport yet? 

Ok, let’s try archery. The right angle between the archer’s arm and torso and the posture of the leg make a big difference. Wearables view the necessary information about the way you shoot your arrow. Maybe you like golf? In golf, the key element is the spine rotation and wearables can also measure this. See the left of the video. Golf can be relaxing or not, depending on how hard you are trying. Zepp Golf is a wearable that you can fix on your golf club to measure the way you swing. Easy does it. 

If not golf, what about softball? Archery, golf, softball and what about tennis or fencing? Join me for part two on this fascinating insight into how wearables are revolutionising the way professional sportspeople and amateurs play the game.