Print“The one-ounce trackers can gauge individual players' cardiovascular exertion, musculoskeletal intensity, fatigue, and rates of acceleration and deceleration. ”
The National Basketball Association is following players more closely than ever with a new wearable biometric tracker being tested in practices and games.
The NBA is outfitting players in its Development League with the trackers to "maximize on-court productivity while optimizing player health and peak player performance," says Dan Reed, president of the league. The NBA's Bakersfield Jam, Fort Wayne Mad Ants, and other teams have already begun outfitting their players with the performance analytics devices and the league plans to roll it out to other development teams in the year ahead.
The one-ounce trackers can gauge individual players' cardiovascular exertion, musculoskeletal intensity, fatigue, and rates of acceleration and deceleration. The device also tracks their number of jumps, distance run, and direction run. Additional NBA D-League teams are expected to adopt the technology before the end of the season.
The NBA did not specify which company is supplying the small devices, worn by players under their jerseys, but details in the NBA's press release suggest it may be Zephyr Technology's BioPatch or BioHarness, products that are already being deployed for continuous wireless monitoring of patients in both hospitals and homes.
The NBA and other national sports leagues have always been obsessed with quantifying and analyzing player and team performance, but advanced technologies are adding new dimensions to the pursuit.
In February 2013, the NBA expanded its partnership with Stats, the sports technology company behind SportVU, a player tracking system set up in every NBA arena to track player positions and game events, such as dribbles, passes, and touches. That data has bolstered the league's already-extensive collection of statistics, a resource it began sharing directly with fans via its own official stats library in partnership with the software company SAP. That system relies on some of the same software that SAP has deployed for biotech companies to accelerate genetic sequencing and analysis.
Converging demands for real-time biometric data in the hospital, home healthcare, and consumer fitness markets are pushing activity and vital sign tracking technologies to become ever more sophisticated. As costs fall, deployments of technologies such as that being used by the NBA are likely to become the norm rather than news.
February 23, 2014
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-nba_taps_wearable_tech_to_track_player_vitals.html
