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The Vision
The SESAME vision
is one in which athletes and coaches are continuously provided with
precise and relevant information about their performance, their
body state and posture, presented in a form determined by sport-specific
training requirements based on a careful analysis of coaching methods
and coaches’ information needs. To realise this, athletes
will wear an easily-extensible range of different sensors that capture
accurate information about their position, skeletal posture, muscular
response, and physiology in a way that is non-intrusive and capable
of working in the context in which the athlete normally performs.
This setup must be engineered so as not to cause injury, discomfort
or performance degradation and it must not interfere with aerodynamics.
Wearable sensors will be complemented by track-side monitors and
video capture equipment and by an integrated hardware/software/network
platform designed to enable substantial volumes of data to be gathered,
recorded, analysed and presented to athletes and coaches in the
most accessible and useful form.
The information obtained from the sensors will be pre-processed
on the athlete to take account of the measurements required and
the prevailing network conditions, and will be transmitted wirelessly
to a base-station and application platform. Here, they will be further
fused and processed in a way that is informed by an understanding
of biomechanical models of athletes; an understanding of the consequences
of sensor placement error and physical properties of the method
of attachment; and the coaching objective for which the data are
being captured. Within SESAME, our primary experimental focus will
be on sprinting, for which precise technique is hugely important
and mechanical constraints on performance are well understood; consequently,
the derived data will include the position, velocity, acceleration
and orientation of the athlete, their stride length and rate, body
posture and instantaneous pressure in the shoes, as well as physiological
data such as heart rate and blood oxygen level. The data will then
be output in three different ways: they will be sent for long term
storage and offline analysis; they will be presented visually to
the coaches in a way that is meaningful to them; and they will be
returned directly to the athlete in real time as biofeedback. In
terms of visual feedback, the predominant technology used in training
for most sports today is video. We propose to enhance this with
a range of sensor-derived data and, later, to investigate augmented
reality techniques for presentation, at all times drawing on the
expertise of coaches at national and local levels to determine priorities
and to devise the precise form of information presentation to coaches
and athletes.
Research Aims
and Objectives
The main objective
of the SESAME project is to conduct high-quality scientific research
to produce deployable systems that have a positive and measurable
impact on the training of elite athletes. This project is application-led
and multidisciplinary and has the following aims:
- To understand
coaching requirements by working with coaches throughout the lifetime
of the project.
- To support
both athletes' and coaches' training and education through:
- capturing
fine-grained data about athletes' actions and performance
using wireless sensors, extensible middleware and networking
platforms;
- processing
these data to extract information that is meaningful to coaches,
using a newly developed biomechanical model to guide this;
- identifying
deviations between captured data and an idealised model of
movement, supporting real-time corrective feedback;
- storing
the data and information in a long-term data store and performing
trend analyses;
- visualising
this information in a form that is meaningful to athlete and
coach.
- To explore
the feasibility of correcting actions and building 'muscle memory'
(the proprioceptive sense) through the use of real-time non-invasive
wireless signalling.
- To compare
and evaluate different athletes' actions and performance, identifying
advantages and disadvantages and informing customised feedback
for individuals.
- To place
the UK firmly at the forefront of sporting technology.
The R&D process within the SESAME project is driven by a set
of critical technical objectives. Consequently, the project activities
have been structured as a set of interlinked milestones; these
will be tackled by interdisciplinary interinstitutional teams,
led by scientists and engineers with world-leading expertise.
Contributions
In addition
to domain-specific contributions, we expect to make research advances
in:
- sensor system
design for monitoring human activities;
- biomechanical
modelling and its symbiosis with the modelling of human activity
in sensor-enabled applications;
- filtering
and fusion to support quality of service/reliability requirements
with high-volume sensor data capture;
- engineering
of interactive sensor-driven applications;
- integration
of sensor monitoring data and derived guidance information within
electronic health records;
- autoconfiguration
for sensor systems;
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