In-Chest Sensors Gather Data on NFL Prospects
- By Kyle Stack
- February 23, 2011 |
- 2:30 pm |
- Categories: Apparel, Data, Training
For years, the NFL Combine has been vilified as a host for a series of workouts that don’t accurately measure a football player’s impact on the field. Now, one company has potentially changed that with an electronic shirt that tracks everything from heart rate to g force of acceleration.
Somewhere between 10 and 30 prospects, including Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Cam Newton, will wear the Under Armour E39 compression shirt during Combine workouts, which begin this Saturday. It weighs less than 4.5 oz and is made from the same material as the rest of the company’s line of compression-based apparel.
Yet just below the sternum, the shirt also contains a removable sensor pack called a “bug” that holds a triaxial accelerometer, a processor and 2 gigabytes of storage. The information collected can be broadcast via Bluetooth to smartphones, iPads and laptops so that scouts and trainers can view the power and efficiency of each athlete’s movements. Heart-rate and breathing-rate monitors are placed on both sides of the sensor pack, helping to gather even more intel from the body’s core.
“What we have is something very close to the body’s center of mass that’s measuring the accelerometry data from that center of mass,” Under Armour vice president Kevin Haley told Wired.com.
To incorporate the technology into the shirt, Under Armour partnered with Zephyr, a data software company based in Annapolis, Maryland, which typically makes products for the defense and health care industries.
What Zephyr provided was a system that uses that center of mass to measure data. Although it has been reported that the E39 shirt uses electronic touch points to accumulate that information, Haley made clear that the touch points aren’t the sensors people might think of as dotting various parts of a shirt — they’re all located within the sensor pack.
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