The latest weapon in Australian athletes’ training arsenal has just been added thanks to a new collaboration announced today by the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) and the CSIRO.

In a world first, a mobile radio transmitter attached to an athlete or equipment can track their every move.  The information is instantaneously sent back to the coach via a wireless network, enabling monitoring of an athlete’s location, speed and position relative to other athletes.
 
For a cyclist training in a velodrome, a light, mobile phone-sized device can be attached to the bike and can monitor, in real time, the cyclist’s location, speed, split times and accelerations.  As well, the device can marry this information with the athlete’s sensory data such as body temperature and various indicators of fatigue.

This information will help coaches and sport scientists adjust the training for their athletes to provide a winning edge over competitor nations. While other monitoring devices such as GPS are currently used, they do not offer the combined accuracy and ease of use of the new radio tracking system, and they have limited applicability to indoor sports.

Head of the AIS Applied Research Centre, Professor Allan Hahn, said, ‘CSIRO’s ground breaking technology will help the AIS monitor athlete movements with a level of accuracy that we have never had before.  The detailed information this tracking system can provide to the coach, for indoor and outdoor sports, will help adjust training regimes and strategies.

‘When you consider that many world rankings are determined by just milliseconds, this AIS-CSIRO collaboration could help to produce Australia’s next sporting triumph.’

The radio tracking system will be particularly useful in team based sports such as hockey and soccer because it has the capacity to monitor the position of every player on the field simultaneously.  This will help the players and coaches analyse attack and defence formations and in some cases to scrutinise competitor strategies.

According to Dr Jay Guo, CSIRO ICT Centre’s Wireless Technologies Research Director, ‘The application of wireless research, particularly in indoor or tightly confined areas, has resulted in a system that can be adapted for many different purposes from the development of elite athletes to miners and emergency service personnel.’

The collaborative research is being conducted in Marsfield in Sydney and at various sporting venues.

AIS media contact: Chris Owens, 0439 480 680
CSIRO media contact: Joanne Finlay, 0447 639688