Wearable Technology In Elite Sport

Wearable devices are being used by an increasing number of elite-level sports teams to manage and control the health, performance, and productivity of their athletes. Drawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary resources, Wearable Technology in Elite Sport reveals how wearable devices are used to quantify athletic bodies in ways that have a number of undesirable consequences for the embodied subject. This book identifies some of the problematic consequences of excessive ‘dataveillance’ in sport by interrogating the process by which wearable data is produced, represented, and enacted in the governance of athletic behaviour. The book provides a set of conceptual resources for thinking critically about the powerful role played by measurement systems in shaping athletic embodiment. The themes that this book examines include an exploration of how technological devices serve an important disciplinary function in elite sport and how wearable-derived data might act to affect high-level athletes. The book is written in a lively and accessible style and appeals to a broad academic readership including undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of fields including sports science, coaching, digital health, sociology, information studies, and science and technology studies.

The book provides a set of conceptual resources for thinking critically about the powerful role played by measurement systems in shaping athletic embodiment. The themes that this book examines include an exploration of how technological devices serve an important disciplinary function in elite sport and how wearable-derived data might act to affect high-level athletes.

This book explores emerging trends in wearable sensors for sport and highlights the developments taking place. Drawing on the literature both the approaches and principals for the use of sensors in sport are outlined, and together with references to key works the reader finds this useful in considering such endeavours. The development of wearable technologies is fast paced and accompanying that is an exponential growth in the use and development of computing resources, thus while the review is comprehensive on content not all works can be included and given publication times will inevitably be somewhat dated. The illumination through trends, examples and principles are an aid for anyone considering the use of sensors and wearables in sports.

Rapid advances in wearable technologies and real-time monitoring have resulted in major inroads in the world of recreational and elite sport. One such innovation is the application of real-time monitoring, which comprises a smartwatch application and ecosystem, designed to collect, process and transmit a wide range of physiological, biomechanical, bioenergetic and environmental data using cloud-based services. This articles assesses the impact of this wireless technology during Tokyo 2020, where this technology could help characterize the physiological and thermal strain experienced by an athlete, as well as determine future management of athletes during a medical emergency as a result of a more timely and accurate diagnosis. Here the authors describe some of the innovative technologies developed for numerous sports at Tokyo 2020 ranging from race walking (20 km and 50 km events), marathon, triathlon, road cycling (including the time trial event), mountain biking, to potentially team sports played outdoors.

This book provides a comparison of different wearable technology systems used in professional football. Furthermore, it includes a qualitative study about the possibilites of amateur football clubs to use said devices or similar ones and to see if it makes sense to use wearable technology in amateur football.

Several internal and external factors have been identified to estimate and control the psycho-biological stress of training in order to optimize training responses and to avoid fatigue, overtraining and other undesirable health effects of an athlete. An increasing number of lightweight sensor-based wearable technologies (“wearables”) have entered the sports technology market. Non-invasive sensor-based wearable technologies could transmit physical, physiological and biological data to computing platform and may provide through human-machine interaction (smart watch, smartphone, tablet) bio-feedback of various parameters for training load management and health. However, in theory, several wearable technologies may assist to control training load but the assessment of accuracy, reliability, validity, usability and practical relevance of new upcoming technologies for the management of training load is paramount for optimal adaptation and health.

Monitoring Training and Performance in Athletes provides practitioners with the information needed in order to oversee an athlete monitoring system and to collect, analyze, and interpret monitoring data so that training programs can be adjusted to achieve optimal athlete preparation and performance.