Back in the early days at Innovation Lab one of the most popular projects was the so-called intelligent soccer shirt. Evil rumours kept saying that the purpose of the shirt was to provide a much needed increase of intelligence to be sported by the local soccer team, but actually the intent was to develop a t-shirt with embedded transponders and sensors allowing the t-shirt – and thus the soccer player – to be tracked while on the field. In addition we wished to read out heart rate, body temperature etc. A lot of bright minds were gathered to develop the system back then. Various techniques were considered for the tracking – for example GPS and ground based radio triangulation. UWB and bluetooth protocols were tested but to cut a long story short eventually the project was terminated – we couldn’t obtain a reasonable accuracy, neither spatial or temporal. We were left with a nice mockup running on a laptop.
Just today – about 3 years later – I saw the vision implemented in a commercial system. Very cool! It was developed by Inmotio and installed at PSV Eindhoven (yes, I did hear the Tottenham supporters prior to the UEFA cup game yesterday – actually I was forced to listen to them for about an hour on the train from Rotterdam…). The system is also in place at AC Milans training facilities. It comes with a price tag of €170.000, so it is still not for just any sports club to install it. The spatial accuracy of the system is about 5 cm with a sampling frequency of 1000 Hz. That will meet most requirements – though not quite AC Milan’s; they have asked for a samplig frequency of 20.000 Hz (but then again, they are not in a hurry; the higher frequency is required for the first team, but currently the system is installed on the practice field for the second team and being a star player on the first team in Milan you would never consider practising on a field otherwise used by second team players – or so the story says…). The tracking and sensor hardware comes with software to crunch the numbers and on top of it infographics to turn goal probabilities out of the statistics. In the near future matematicians will win the games…
Anyway, great to see a vision coming true – a pity though that we didn’t manage it in the first place.