Imperial to head £8.5M sports research programme

Scientists at Imperial College London are to head a £8.5 million project to develop a range of miniaturised wearable and track-side sensors, computer modelling tools and smart training devices to help athletes improve their performance.

The Elite Sport Performance Research in Training with Pervasive Sensing (ESPRIT) project is funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and is led by Imperial in partnership with UK Sport and Queen Mary, University of London and Loughborough University. Researchers from the three universities will work alongside athletes via UK Sport’s Research and Innovation programme.

The miniature wearable sensors will monitor different aspects of athletes’ physiological performance, in order to monitor and optimise training for competitive performance. The sensors will include wireless wearable nodes to measure biochemical information, heart rate, muscle activity, joint speed and contact forces.

Athletes will use this information to understand how they are progressing and developing with their training.

The researchers will also develop small track-side sensors, for detailed monitoring of an athlete’s body movements and location, and of interactions between a team during training.

Sports scientists can currently monitor athletes’ performance through controlled experiments in a laboratory setting or, increasingly, via commercially available technologies that can be used in the field. However, the devices used for this are often large and either not suitable for use in day to day training, or able to measure only one aspect of an athlete’s or team’s performance.

Consequently, the data collected is not realistic enough for sports scientists and coaches to understand how athletes are performing in a training or competition environment.

The new wireless sensing technologies the ESPRIT team is developing will extract continuous information under normal training and competition environments, giving coaches far more accurate and regular feedback about performance. The researchers will be working with the high performance sports community, with the ultimate aim of creating a competitive advantage for elite athletes.

Guang-Zhong Yang from Imperial, who is the principal investigator and programme director of ESPRIT, says, “We expect that the ESPRIT project will make innovative leaps in biosensor design and allow us to look in really fine detail at the physiological changes that happen to an athlete during training and competition. This means that athletes and their coaches will be able to gain an unprecedented understanding of their performance and use this to develop a crucial competitive edge.”