Five technologies that football should consider next
But for the sport in general, it represented a milestone in the adoption of technology in football, being the first major tournament to see a goal awarded thanks to goal line technology.
However, far more sophisticated technology is already being used by athletes to monitor vital signs and improve performance. Meanwhile, adjudication and rule enforcement in many competitive sports, from rugby to snowboarding, have long ago handed over control to far more sophisticated video referees than the much heralded goal line technology.
Given the overwhelmingly positive response to the latest set of innovations, aside from a few players with 9:15 Fairplay ‘vanishing foam’ on their boots, which other technologies should FIFA, the teams and their players now consider?
High-speed video
The most obvious technology they should next look to adopt is one with a proven track record in football, already being used in the Premier League. Whilst GoalControl’s goal line sensing technology is a great step forward, Hawk-Eye technology already offers far more sophisticated vision processing.
Hawk-Eye, whose inventor Dr Paul Hawkins was recently awarded an OBE, employs multiple high-speed cameras to triangulate the position, trajectory and path of a ball at any given time. It’s already seen use in a few games during the last Premier League season, and was adopted by the Ashes as far back as 2001.
Wireless motion sensors
The Nike+ iPod sensor was one of the first ‘mainstream’ consumer wireless sensors for tracking activity, but now there are a huge number of similar products.
Apple’s most recent smartphone, the iPhone 5S, looked to cut out the middle-man by introducing the M7 motion co-processor, which collects data from the phone’s accelerometer, gyroscope and compass.
Wireless motion sensors have also been used extensively in professional sport in the capacity of improving performance. Companies including Zepp Labbs and Blast Motion combine motion sensors with video to help athletes improve baseball or golf swings.
Stats companies such as Opta already track the distance covered by players using multiple cameras and the trend for consumer ‘quantified self’ tracking has grown exponentially. For example, devices like Fitbit and Jawbone track your every day movements and transmit the data to a mobile app.
Using this technology, more accurate, detailed statistics could be generated directly from the players’ themselves. Not only would these be of interest to spectators, but it would also offer a whole new wealth of data for de-briefing sessions after a match.
Wearables
Without reiterating what has been said a thousand other times about the potential of wearables for consumers, current implementations typically come down to a wearable device that acts as an extension of an individual’s smartphone.
But when coupled with biometric sensors, like MC10’s stick-on Biostamp, wearable technology suddenly becomes a critical component in an athlete’s inventory. Rather than checking a text on their smartwatch, they are instead served a host of invaluable data: from heart rate and muscle activity, to hydration and glucose levels.
This would allow footballers to safely push themselves in training further than before, with this real-time data delivery allowing them to arrive at the tournament at peak performance.
HUD
Another area of wearable tech that is generating a lot of discussion is the heads up display, through Google Glass. However, while Glass has many potential everyday use cases, those in sport are potentially the most exciting. Companies other than Google have spotted this opportunity and started to exploit it.
Recon Instruments integrates heads up displays into sporting eyewear, once again delivering critical information to athletes by putting the information right into the line of view; helpful if you’re in the midst of competition and can’t afford to glance at a watch or screen elsewhere.
Recon has also created cycling glasses with their own GPS and other on board sensors to deliver speed, distance and elevation data, as well as the potential for connectivity to other sensors and smartphones. Another product is for snow sports, allowing snowboarders and skiers to see stats for their vertical descent, speed and airtime, along with the additional connectivity for external data.
Whilst HUDs are less practical for players to wear in a contact sport like football, they could prove invaluable for referees, allowing them to communicate with other officials and watch video replays, without taking their eyes off the action.
E-textiles
The ingenuity of Recon’s products is that they are not new or additional devices for sportsmen and women; cyclists and snowboarders already wear eyewear, Recon just adds the technology. Another way to add technology to the existing athlete attire is through textiles, and companies including Intelligent Textiles and Textronics are finding ways to monitor and enhance performance by integrating electronics into textile structures.
Textronics, which markets its textile sensor products under the Numetrex brand, has worked with the likes of Adidas to produce wearable shirts with interwoven sensors for the monitoring of heart rate, with the data being sent to an external device via Bluetooth.
Billions of us love our sport, and understandably many don’t want to see it changed. A possible reason why football has been slow on the uptake of goal line monitoring is this fear of change, but the purpose of tech in sport should not be to change the game itself.
The best examples of technology use in sport manage to ‘get out of the way’ of the sport, improving and enabling better performance or adjudication, but ultimately adding as little complication as possible. We’ll soon be exploring these examples of high-speed video, motion sensors, e-textiles and HUD in practice on the element14 Community, with a view to achieving this.
About the author:
Mike Powell is Technical Development Manager at Farnell element14.
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