Technology in Sport

The variety of sports available to us all has exploded of recent years, with the introduction of many new ‘alternative’ sports.  The Olympics Games for example hosts nearly 400 events in 33 sport disciplines compared with its origins in Ancient Greece where there was just one race.  The expansion of sports is similar to the advance in technology, more specifically electronic technology. This article will look at some of these technologies and some of the applications they are used in.

Security and Identification

Since September 2001, security has increased dramatically, and sports stadiums pose a prime terrorist venue with their large crowds, political and celebrity visitors.  Electronics technology can be found in surveillance, in CCTV cameras, IP Camera Networks and Data Information Security.  In managing these large crowds, sophisticated access control systems are essential, and today’s biometric, voice recognition and RFID technology makes this possible.  In moving all the equipment around these stadiums in a safe and secure way, new asset tracking products are indeed an asset, included in which you will find alarm systems detecting any anomaly not previously recorded.

The products involved in these systems are typically processor based, particularly DSP.  However, many processors are utilized in security design, usually 32-bit.  Today’s advances in both ARM and MIPS RISC architecture allows an abundance of inexpensive, yet versatile chips.  So too has sensing advanced, and camera chip technology with it.  Indeed sensor technology as a whole has increased, with MEMS sensors coming to the fore in many current designs.

Medical

Athletes today have to undergo rigorous drug testing to ensure a level playing field amongst competitors.  Many of the products used to quickly analyse the athletes’ blood are almost always electronic in nature, using miniaturised spectrometry techniques.  During training, the athlete’s performance is closely monitored to ensure maximum efficiency in both training and competing.  The Paraolympic Games is now held alongside the Olympic Games, and artificial limbs now use the very latest robotic technology and materials.  Unfortunately, at these intense levels of competitiveness, there are accidents and injuries do occur.  On site defibrillators are a good example of where technology can be used to save lives.

The components used in Medical applications are vast, but there are a few that are purpose built for this sub-industry such as bio-gas sensors and high resolution analogue-to-digital converters. Instrumentation Most Olympic races are timed to the thousandth of a second. In track events, the timer is set off by the starter's gun and stopped by a laser at the finish. A high-speed camera at the line takes 2,000 images per second to help determine the winner if the race is close. Swimming events are timed by contact plates that determine when a swimmer leaves her mark and when she touches the wall to end the race.  During training, equipment such as exercise bikes and treadmills often have highly advanced electronics to vary the activity based on a complex variety of inputs.  The technology used to train national athletes very often has broad stream appeal in everyday gyms, an ever-increasing past time of choice as the world becomes more aware of diet and exercise.

Lighting

The newest techniques and performance innovations can help maximize lighting systems and reduce energy consumption. This is true for illumination and applications for advertising and video multimedia.  For the Beijing Olympics, Ministry of Science and Technology seized the opportunity to promote solid-state lighting technology in 21 pioneer cities and planned to install 6 million LED lights for functional and landscape lighting. In remote rural and pasturing areas, the so-called “golden sun” project focused mainly on solar energy lighting technology used in Beijing Olympics.  Cree, an LED company, provided about 440,000 LEDs for the Water Cube structure at the Beijing Olympics.  Example of uses include digital signage, track lighting, merchandise and fixtures, fitting and of course lighting itself.

As well as the obvious LEDs, as given in the example of Cree, many LEDs are pre-mounted onto heat sinks, commonly known as Light Engines or Modules.  Indeed many applications have purpose-made Lighting Systems.  There are also many lighting-specific components that support these LED designs such as thermal management products, backlighting, filters, colour control ICs, displays and interconnect products.

Multimedia

Entertainment is mainstream and, with the advent of the internet, now accessible in millions of new applications.  Historically these products would have been labelled broadcast or AV, but with so many diverse uses of these products, applications are now taking advantage of this pervasive technology, for example Imaging, Mixed Signal, Audio systems.

The main example from a product perspective is derived from the signal chain or path, from input devices such as sensors, to amplifiers, filters and multiplexers, to mixed signal components such as tuners and CODECs, to image processing chips, to displays utilizing new OLED technology, to Interconnect using new multimedia standards such as HDMI.

Communications

Communications concerns the transmission of digitally encoded messages between devices. It can be broadly classified into traditional voice telephone connections, local area networking, wireless communications ranging from cellular to satellite systems.  Perhaps not strictly sport specific, it is clear that any large sport facility will need sophisticated communication networks to transmit the events and information regarding as fast, secure and complete as possible.

Products used in communications are often application specific depending on the frequency and protocol of the technology used.  But almost all come in modular form, supported by and including processors, transceivers, routers, hubs, servers, storage devices, KVM switches, 2-way radios and modems.

Infrastructure

The Beijing Meteorological Bureau purchased one of the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world from IBM to help predict weather and pollution levels for all events in and around Beijing. The Chinese are also adept at controlling the weather. The Beijing Weather Modification Office (seriously) fires cloud seeding material into oncoming rain clouds with anti-aircraft guns, draining the precipitation before it can cause problems.

This and other innovative solutions will involve many components, both board-mounted and stand-alone.  Products such as generators, meters, tools, cables, computers, TV, Servers, Storage, Ticketing machines, kiosks, elevators and escalators to name a few, will all feature in some shape or form.