Sensing intensifies ...

In order for us to monitor the athlete the best, our solution utilizes the following sensors:

• Force sensor (scale for weight/button to push)
• Accelerometer
• Heart beat monitor
• Temperature sensor
• Sweat sensor
• GPS
• Camera

The usage of some of these are fairly straight-forward, whereas others require some explanation. To begin with, one wants to know the weight of the athlete in order to know the baseline of the physical data for the athlete. The accelerometer is used to measure the forces exhibited by/working on the athlete while he/she is in motion. Heart beat monitoring is used in order to measure the physical strain the athlete experiences. The temperature and sweat sensors also gives an indirect measure of the strain experienced by the athlete, but these also serve the purpose of giving an indication of the comfort level of the athlete. GPS is used to store data about where the exercising was performed, and the camera is used for analysis of technique.

Most of these are even battery powered and portable, which enables the user to record data on the fly and while out in the skiing tracks! In addition to the ones seen in the pictures above, we utilize the GPS tracking capabilities of android smartphones, as can be seen in our blog post about our native app. The following plot is an example of the data harvested from the accelerometer, showing acceleration in g's in three dimensions.

Monitoring the data from an active athlete is intense work, we would argue it is intense enough to warrant the "This is intense!"-badge!