Coaches and team physicians, would you like to know when a player exceeds his maximum pulse rate or core body temperature during extreme training? Perhaps having real-time monitoring of creatine kinase, blood glucose, lactic acid or pH levels would help you fine tune your athletes while avoiding dangerous medical events. Sound impossible? Dr Adrian Faccione, founder of GPSports, is making such high tech monitoring a reality.

On-the-fly physiological monitoring of athletes is developing to a stage where an elite sports coaching box is looking more and more like a Formula One garage, each player being constantly monitored to ensure maximum performance while avoiding injuries. Speed and conditioning expert Dr Adrian Faccione, founder of GPSports talks to us about the cutting edge of elite athlete management, and the amazing future technologies that are now in development. The original MP3 of the interview with Dr Adrian Faccione is available here.
The GPS-enabled devices are strapped to individual players throughout a game or training session, and measure a number of metrics over time. GPSports founder and fitness training expert Adrian Faccione explains: “We get position, we get speed, we get distance, we get heart rate, we get impacts from when an athlete runs into another athlete. We collate all the impacts, large and small, and we come up with what we call “body load” – which is basically the total physiological stress placed upon the body with all the accelerations and decelerations that take place in a training session or game….
“The real power of this is that you’ll be able to set upper and lower limits for a range of different variables for an athlete. For instance you might say “I want this athlete to run no more than 10km in a game. So as it gets close to that we’ve got a dashboard that shows he’s getting close. Or you might set an upper limit on heart rate, and if it gets above 180 we want to know, and the machine goes ‘ping’ when it does that.
The next step: pattern recognition to tell us what sets special athletes apart. “The accelerometer, these are really tiny little devices, so we may think about developing four or six really tiny accelerometer sensors that you put onto the wrists and ankles and knees and elbows, and that then stream data short-range back to the centralised unit which you may be wearing on your back, and that then streams that back to the sideline. That’s something we may look at in the next 12 to 18 months. So you have a 3-D image of how your player is doing things. You can start to get technical and say ‘did they do that right under pressure,’ for instance.
…”Ultimately in the future, we’ll be able to add more physiological analysis, in particular blood analysis,” says Faccione, “which will be a pretty amazing development. Lactose, glucose, pH, those sorts of things. So say with glucose, straight away you could apply that to a diabetic on the street, or to a super-elite athlete that’s doing an endurance event.” Real-time monitoring of blood glucose, lactic acid and pH are already on the drawing board, as are some other interesting ideas: “There’s a thing called creatine kinase, and that’s a measure of how much muscle damage is being done so if you go into a gym and do a really hard workout, what happens is you get muscle breakdown, and one of the outputs of that is creatine kinase. So before you do your next session you can know exactly what your levels are at – we’ll be able to totally determine how hard, or if you should in fact train at all, for a particular modality.”

Dr. Faccione envisions future advancements that include integrating his products with intelligent fabrics and voice recognition and will produce “next-gen sports clothing that can teach you how to play a sport!” That means your golf shirt can tell you how bad you are…
A must read article at Gizmag…
GPSports…