The Real-Time Monitoring and Impact on Athletes’ Health

Abstract

As athletes engage in sporting events, the process of monitoring theme in the real-time is important because it poses the beneficial effect of maximizing their performance, as well as ensuring that any possible injury or burn-out is prevented. Furthermore, the monitoring ensures that new and exciting applications are enabled; including enhanced television broadcast and referee-assisted services. Indeed, advanced monitoring devices have been developed to provide room for truly non-intrusive monitoring of the physiological functioning of athletes. Despite this promising trend, it is worth noting that the battery capacities are small and this challenge comes in the wake of other compounding attributes such as susceptibility to body effects and limited wireless range, hence inefficiency in the real-time extraction of data. The challenge is profound in sporting events where the playing areas are large. In this study, a novel application is presented. The application relies on body area sensor networks to monitor the physiological functioning of players. The motivation of the study is to give insight into the degree to which high delays to the transmission of data between the base stations and the players could arise from the moderating role of the operating environment. The study culminates into the development of a multi-hop routing protocol through which the delay and resource consumption’s competing objectives could be balanced, hence improved efficiency in the functionality of the wireless sensor networks.