After a decade or so of working with inertial and other body worn sensors we have had the chance to work with many sports and along the way have developed some in-house tools to enable users to get down to the business of data collection a bit quicker and to really hit the ground running. Yes, there are products on the market that do this, but they were often application specific, so we ended up building our own so we could customise many things. Throughout that time we have been asked if they are for sale which was something we never considered as the research was always focused on well, research, or a particular product for a client.
Late last year though we were offered some support from the university to come up with a ‘research tool’ that might be useful as a way to build collaboration and field our enquiries. Thus we came up with SABEL Sense, it’s not quite a product, but a tool that exists in the middle for trying out ideas and an intermediary to development of a final product.
The hardware, whilst nothing special, contains the usual inertial sensors, has a breakout capability for other sensors and is run by a small operating system so it can be customised rapidly. Married to that is a set of Matlab tools for wireless data transfer, synchronisation of multiple units, together with other sources, such as MOCAP and video. We went for Matlab because its easy to change and the performance is good enough for development.
Get Some
It proved popular with several universities already use the tools. If you would like to find out more goto our SABEL Sense page or contact Ray ray(AT)qsportstechnology.com
See us in the next few weeks, where a few of our papers use the technology at
International Sports Engineering Association ISEA Engineering of Sport in the UK http://www.isea2014.com
International Association of Computer Science in Sports IACSS 2014 Conference http://www.cdu.edu.au/iacss2014/
Sports Technology Blog 