Sensing technology may be the finest route towards Olympic success

02Jul08

The end is in sight. Muscles aching, a racing heartbeat, rapid breathing whilst the last dose of adrenaline is released to propel him down the final straight, and before he knows it comes the exhilarating moment and sheer ecstasy associated with crossing the finish line.

 

Months of training are an absolute necessity in order for athletes to be wholly prepared for their races. Thousands will be preparing, hoping to compete in the London 2012 Olympics. Monitoring their individual progress is crucial and this may be getting slightly easier with the recent promising advances in sensing technology.

 

Scientists at Imperial College London have developed a wireless ear–worn sensor as part of their Body Sensor Networks (BSN) research. BSN are wearable sensors that interact with a receiver, be it a laptop or a mobile phone. They transmit information about a person’s physical parameters, such as activity, oxygen levels and temperature. The small sensors can be worn on different parts of the body. Dr Louis Atallah, a member of the research team, explained that there is “a big international community now converging on BSN. It’s a very interesting field.”

 

The novel ear-worn sensor was created by Professor Guang-Zhong Yang, head of the Visual Information Processing Group (VIP) in the Department of Computing at Imperial College. It was demonstrated at the Science Museum Sporting Futures Exhibition earlier this year. The sensor itself looks like a small crescent. It only weighs a couple of grams and fits snugly behind the ear. The creators believe this device to be much more advanced than current sensor technologies, which at present require athletes to be wired up to a monitor in a lab situation. These conditions hardly mirror those of the natural training environment and consequently this prevents coaches from getting a true indication of their athletes’ performance.

 

Julian Pansiot, a PhD student and research assistant in the VIP group, explained the current research being carried out into the uses of this novel device: “At the moment we are working on two main groups of applications; the first one being healthcare. We typically want to monitor either post-operative patients or elderly patients in their home and check whether their behavior is evolving correctly. The second application is sports where we can monitor athletes’ motion.”

 

The sensor embeds a miniature processor within the earpiece, which gathers data such as posture, step frequency and acceleration. Being able to monitor the performance of an athlete whilst they are training trackside in real-time allows the coach to detect problems, for example incorrect posture at the start of a run, and immediately rectify it.

 

It is not only those scientists involved in sensing research that are enthusiastic about its growing field, but sportsmen themselves. Kelly McKenzie, the fitness manager at Sport Imperial, is enthusiastic about this novel way to monitor athletes’ progress. She is especially keen to use this “great tool” to carefully monitor patterns of injury and recovery. She added: “Technology within the sporting world is always increasing. It’s quite hard sometimes to keep updated with it all but that’s what we need to do to progress. To get our athletes up to a top standard, we need to grow with the industry.”

 

The sensor has been tested in trials, scientists working closely with surgeons and their post-operative patients, Pansiot explaining how “the group has clinical validation on the usefulness of the sensor.”

 

The use of this device in healthcare must not be ignored. Another team member, Dr Benny Lo is particularly interested in the medical aspects of the device: “The constant stream of real-time information flowing from these sensors wirelessly to computers means medical staff could monitor the elderly and people living with chronic diseases like degenerative arthritis or Parkinson’s disease without the patient needing to visit their doctor.” Dr Atallah added that many of us “have a grandma or a grandpa that live alone. This is a way of remotely monitoring them if they fall down without being intrusive.”

 

The progression within this field is certainly fascinating. By taking advantage of the progression of sensing technology, athletes’ training can be personalised and optimised, hopefully propelling British athletes to Olympic victory in only a couple of years’ time.

 

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Tags: 2012, Athlete, Body Sensor Networks, Imperial College, Olympics, Sensor, Sport