In the world of modern sport events technology can be found
in various ways. The distance measurements, detection if
balls are out of the bounds or simply the communication
between referees in a soccer match are just examples of a
wide area of technologies used in nowadays events.A further aspect is the real-time positioning or
localization of athletes during a competition. The knowledge
of the exact position, speed, acceleration and additional
parameters of an athlete in real-time can provide useful
information to coaches, referees and sport enthusiasts.
Coaches, for example, could track the covered distances,
instantaneous and mean velocities and the exact time on
field of their athletes. Such data would offer easier
determination of overall performance and conclusions on
energy expenditure. Furthermore, tracking single sportsmen
can improve the entertainment factor of the event. The
audience likes to get analyses of matches (e.g. the distance
run by a soccer player) and real-time information about the
current split times in races (e.g. in skiing) that can be
provided by localization systems.
This project uses different sensors and localization
techniques to obtain information about the position of
athletes. Depending on the specific environment of each
sport, individual systems can be found. Outdoor sports can
rely on GPS reception. Indoor events usually take place in a
limited court size and sensors to be used in a local
positioning system could be installed at the venue in
advance. Further, inertial sensors provide additional
information about the movement of the athlete. After
obtaining sufficient sensor data, the gathered information
is filtered and a data fusion process provides the current
position of the athlete in real-time.