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In the modern era of sport, results are often decided by ultra-fine margins like milliseconds or millimeters. Yet even precise metrics such as speed and distance are still quite rudimentary in nature. The real wins for athletes, coaches, and sporting teams are gained through a much deeper understanding of sports performance and potential improvement.
To achieve these goals and help obtain a competitive advantage, the latest performance tracking solutions lean on the power of wireless connectivity and edge processing.
Monitoring unique performance metrics in sport
Combining dozens of datapoints makes it possible to build a unique profile of an individual’s abilities. Examples in each sport might include the athlete’s body movement during key actions, or the position, launch angle, spin rate, and acceleration rate of the bat or ball at various game stages.
For individual sports like athletics and cycling, key metrics might focus on biomechanical efficiency and technical precision. For team sports including the various football codes, common metrics include sprints, accelerations, decelerations, and workload intensity.
Bluetooth LE turns raw data into powerful insights
Sports tracking solutions based on wireless tech make these and other powerful metrics readily available, in turn helping sports industry stakeholders achieve more nuanced insights.
Tools like inertial sensors, anchor devices, and location services form systems that measure sports parameters in near real time. The high volume of raw data generated can be processed and analyzed using algorithms running on the sensor or wearable’s integrated wireless device before the information is forwarded—using low latency wireless connectivity such as Bluetooth LE—to an accompanying app on the user’s smartphone or a web-based dashboard on their laptop.
Ball and athlete tracking technology in action
Ball tracking technology, for example, delivers data on the trajectory, spin, and bounce of the ball, helping to measure the quality and accuracy of passes and shots, or evaluate defensive and offensive positioning. Athlete tracking technology, meanwhile, provides insights on the precise position, movement, and activity of the players themselves to help measure their performance, fitness, workload, and tactical decision-making.
Moreover, wearable tech attached to the wrist, chest, or other parts of the body enables a much deeper dive into data, potentially revealing key information about an athlete’s heart rate variability (HRV), VO2 max, muscle fatigue, lactic acid, power output, and other important physical parameters. Such insights can provide a better understanding of athletic training, recovery, and injury prevention.
A Nordic Bluetooth LE soccer tracking solution
One prominent example of wireless sports technology in action is the Nordic-powered Apex Series, used by a host of major international sporting organizations including English Premier League football clubs.
Embedded in a custom lightweight vest worn by the athlete, STATSports’ Apex employs Bluetooth LE connectivity to wirelessly sync sports-specific metrics to smartphones and tablets for coaches to make informed decisions during a match or training session.
The device integrates a range of sensors including a high impact accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and augmented GNSS. These sensors provide comprehensive data including heart rate, total distance covered, current and maximum speed, number of sprints, accelerations, impacts, dynamic stress load, and step balance.
Edge AI for predictive modeling
But the ultimate game-changer in the sports sector comes in the form of predictive modeling and data-driven analytics performed at the edge.
When relevant data is not only crunched but analyzed and interpreted using the power of ‘Edge AI’ algorithms, sports analysts can take advantage of even more precise and personalized insights. Adding AI and Machine Learning (ML) to the mix allows, for example, a sports wearable with the same sensors as before to now continuously monitor several performance parameters simultaneously, uncovering meaningful patterns that were previously hidden.
By analyzing both historical data and real-time sensor information, statistical models can pinpoint factors that have a major impact on the way athletes prepare and perform, not to mention identify opposition strategies and gauge overall team dynamics.
nRF54 Series SoCs enable the future of sports analytics devices
Behind every breakthrough in next-generation sports tracking is hardware built to handle extreme demands. The fourth-generation wireless SoCs from Nordic Semiconductor, the nRF54 Series, deliver exactly that – combining unmatched processing power, ultra-low power consumption, and advanced on-chip AI capabilities.
To make sense of all the available sensor data in context and quickly enough to enable rapid and effective decision-making, powerful integrated wireless SoCs such as the nRF54L Series provide the serious processing heft to perform the ML and sensor fusion that forms part of Edge AI. By running Edge AI using a Nordic Semiconductor nRF54 Series SoC, for example, the local processing will use less power than sending data over the air, allowing a sports analytics device to have longer operation and smaller battery size.
The result is sophisticated sports analytics solutions that are changing the game.
