The Elite Sport Performance Research in Training with pervasive sensing (ESPRIT) project is being led by Imperial College London in partnership with UK Sport and supported by Queen Mary University of London and Loughborough University.

The new £8.5 million project, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, is developing a range of miniaturised wearable and trackside sensors, computer modelling tools and smart training devices to help British athletes, including sprinter Harry Aikines-Aryeetey (pictured), take their performances to the next level. 

The researchers are devising miniature wearable sensors that will monitor different aspects of athletes’ physiological performance, in order to monitor and optimise training for competitive performance.
Sports scientists can currently monitor athletes’ performance through controlled experiments in a laboratory setting or, increasingly, via commercially available technologies that can be used in the ‘field’.

However, the devices used for this are often large and either not suitable for use in the field, or able to measure only one aspect of an athlete’s or team’s performance. Consequently, the data collected is not realistic enough for sports scientists and coaches to understand how athletes are performing in a training or competition environment.

The new wireless ‘pervasive’ sensing technologies that the ESPRIT team is developing will extract continuous information under normal training and competition environments, giving coaches far more accurate and regular feedback about their athlete’s performance than is currently possible. The researchers will be working with the high performance sports community, with the ultimate aim of creating a competitive advantage for elite athletes.

Professor Guang-Zhong Yang from Imperial College London, who is the principal investigator and programme director of ESPRIT, says: “We expect that the ESPRIT project will make innovative leaps in biosensor design and allow us to look in really fine detail at the physiological changes that happen to an athlete during training and competition.

“This means that athletes and their coaches will be able to gain an unprecedented understanding of their performance and use this to develop a crucial competitive edge. The project will also give scientists new insights into how people’s bodies work, in order to help them to design devices that improve the health and wellbeing of the general population.”