Image: Person on a treadmill wears a smart watch which shows his or her heart rate; Copyright: PantherMedia/apid

Topic of the Month September 2021

More than trendy accessories: training optimization with the help of wearables

Wearables are increasingly being used in sports medicine, for example, to prevent injuries or to provide users individually with real-time data about their fitness and health. By analyzing this data, risks for sports injuries can be identified early and training can be customized to the user's needs and goals. In combination with AI, wearables can additionally learn from the collected data and provide the user with personalized tips and suggestions for their training.

Wearables: Smart Helpers in Sports Medicine

Image: woman wearing sports clothing stretches her leg, she wears a smart watch; Copyright: PantherMedia/Maridav (YAYMicro)

Heart rate monitoring, step-counting, sleep tracking: Wearable technologies keep evolving, offering more and more useful applications. Usually worn close to and/or on the surface of the skin, they are equipped with special sensors to detect and analyze information concerning physical signals or ambient data. This allows wearers to get immediate biofeedback.

Read the article about the use of wearables in sports medicine here

Running: how to prevent injuries with sensors and AI

Image: A female runner is kneeling at the roadside and using her smartwatch; Copyright: PantherMedia/I_am_Daniel

The most common injury that affects runners stems from overuse, not falls. Early warning signs include changes in motion. Successful injury prevention could pick up on this aspect by detecting and responding to these deviations at an early stage. It is the focus of the "Smart Injury Prevention" project.

Read the interview with Dr. Lina Rahlf here

Self-learning sensors help to prevent injuries and to improve the training

Image: a woman with dark hair doing sit ups, wearing a fitnesstracker; Copyright: Robert Bosch GmbH

Artificial intelligence, sensors, wearables: they all collect and process data from their wearers. They are particularly popular in sports, because users no longer have to rely on their intuition, but can optimise their training based on sober, exact data. However, wearables are often criticized for being not only practical gadgets but also data krakens.

Read the interview with Kaustubh Gandhi here

Video

Mysterious patterns – Infrared thermography for sports medicine performance diagnostics

Using a high-resolution infrared camera, sports scientists from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have discovered how blood flow in the human skin changes during exercise. They now want to exactly quantify these changes with machine vision and thus gain knowledge for performance diagnostics and beyond. We learn more about this in the video interview with Barlo Hillen and Daniel Andres Lopez.