Contacts: Simon Fothergill, Computer Lab
Mentor: Dr. John Hunter
A team of researchers from the Computer Lab and Engineering department in Cambridge have worked for the past 2 years on a detailed sensing project for athletes. The SESAME project (SEnsing in Sport and Managed Exercise) has looked at a variety of methods for measuring and analysing the precise performance of athletes in real time, with the aim of developing a system and methodology that can help them to improve their performance.
Simon has taken the results of this work and developed a system to provide supplementary assistance to rowing coaches which is already being trialled by University rowers. The system measures a variety of aspects of the rowers’ performance, using an indoor rowing machine augmented with pressure sensors and cameras. Measurements are fed back to the athlete in real-time and compared to a target stroke, allowing the rower to refine their technique in the absence of their coach.
The question for the i-Team is to investigate what would need to happen for the system to be made commercially available. They will need to consider who are the target customers, which companies would be appropriate commercial partners for the inventors, and which parts of the system will remain of value and interest to rowers and their trainers, if any, after an initial period of use, as well as looking at how much further development of the current prototype system would be needed for it to be saleable and how much would customers pay for such a system.