News Flash

We are now funded by the UK EPSRC for the SESAME project - a major four-year project involving four institutions to develop sentient computing techniques for use in athletics coaching. The SESAME project will commence the autumn of 2006.

Sentient Sports

The Sentient Sports platform is looking at the use of sensors in high level sports coaching.

Sports as a profession, entertainment, business or simply a route to a healthier life attract millions of people worldwide. With the exception of some sports (e.g. motorsport), the majority lack technological assistance. Sports users (athletes and coaches) would benefit from tailored technology if commercially available.

Goals

• To support athletes' training by the provision of fine-grained information about their actions and performance
• To model an athlete's body and its actions
• To compare and evaluate different athletes' actions and performance

Approach

The initial application focus is on training and coaching of athletes in track events. At a later stage, we will explore football and other ball games.

We take the research approach of active tracking of position and medical data of athletes by instrumenting the athlete's body and equipment with customised tiny wireless sensor devices.

Research Challenges

Fine-grained monitoring of athletes' activities will require advances in sensor data acquisition, management and modelling. The mobility of athletes introduces issues such as high rate of change in position, velocity and acceleration. These dynamics pose long-term design challenges in various aspects of a real-time wireless sensor system.

The sports application domain requires advances in:

• motion analysis of athletes;
• wearable sensors and data collection;
• data presentation and automatic detection of actions.

To address these challenges, we are currently pursuing two lines of work:

• Designing a wireless sensor-based platform for measuring and tracking athletes activities in outdoor sports events;
• Investigating software modelling methods for the human body in motion.

Prototype

Zigbee research kits from Crossbow and Freescale. We are integrating various types of sensors in a heterogeneous platform to support our models.

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Student Projects:

• Using accelerometer
• Evaluation of Piezoelectric Film Sensors for In-Shoe Pressure Measurement