Today the Olympics in Rio comes to a close so we thought it would be a good opportunity to point out a few stories showing off the back office sport tech contributions that led to a few medals that we know about.
Last year ISEA student member Brock Laschowski won the ISEA student prize. Since that time he’s been doing his Masters at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, publishing 2 scientific articles in top-tier sports engineering journals. These articles involved the first-ever investigation into how the mechanical properties of rowing oars affect on-water rowing biomechanics. His research was done in collaboration with the Canadian Olympic Rowing Team and Canadian Sports Institute and was a contributing factor in Canda’s rowing successes with Lindsay Jennerich and Patricia Obee taking out silver in the women’s lightweight double sculls you can see the links to his papers here – [link1] and [link2].
Closer to home colleagues at the Queensland Academy of Sport have been working with a variety of our medal-winning athletes. Race-walker Dane Bird-Smith took out bronze in the 20km walk and features in our scope T.V shoot with our SABEL Sense. Scope also shot a piece on his Olympic preparations and you can see Dane using Vicon and the climate chamber (http://tenplay.com.au/channel-eleven/scope/season-3/episode-98 the segment starts at 4min 10 mark).
Last week we hosted the ASTN-Q event and Daniel Chalkley presented his paper “Targeting Rio: Enhancing the Daily Training Environment in Archery Using Technology” The paper discusses biofeedback postural sway training using tech to track the centre of pressure. The archery team discussed in the paper featuring Alec Potts, Ryan Tyack and Taylor Worth, managed Australia’s first ever medal in the Archery – taking out a bronze.
Around the globe different sports engineers have helped athletes claim medals – Here is a link to our friends in TU Delft and their work ahead of the games.
Also, our friends at Sheffield Hallam have posted some really interesting graphics about the games. I love the 100m men’s spread over time, you can see there link here . Also if you haven’t already they have a great blog which you can see and with team GB doing so well in the medal tally, you can bet that the guys at CSER played a big part in that.
What a great Olympics and you can see the growth of sports tech from London to now. Now to catch up on the sleep deficit the Olympics has caused and gear up for the 7th of September with the Paralympics!
If you still can’t get enough of tech, sports engineering and the Olympics here’s a link to a few articles that I enjoyed reading today.
3 Major Changes In Sports Tech between London and Rio
Swimming Pool Design Influencing Pool Speeds
http://www.wsj.com/articles/did-the-olympic-pool-give-some-swimmers-an-advantage-1471470741
LED swimming motion capture for swimming performance analysis
Sports Technology Blog 