The 2015 National Football League (NFL) season kicks off on Thursday, as the New England Patriots host the Pittsburgh Steelers in a game that will not only kick off the start of a new year of hard-hitting gridiron action, but a new high-tech era for the sport as a whole.
According to CIO, as players take the field this season, their shoulder pads will be equipped with two radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensors roughly the same size as a quarter. Each RFID sensor will emit a unique radio frequency that will be detected by 20 receivers placed throughout each NFL stadium, allowing them to pinpoint each player’s position, speed and more.
The use of two sensors per player (one in each shoulder pad) will allow the technology to tell the way said athlete was facing on each play, the website added. The data will be used for the Xbox One and Windows 10 “NFL 2015” app, allowing users to see detailed stats for players while they view highlight clips, and will also be provided to coaches, players and broadcasters.
“We’ve always had these traditional NFL stats,” Matt Swensson, the league’s senior director of Emerging Products and Technology, told CIO. “The league has been very interested in trying to broaden that and bring new statistics to the fans. Along the way, there’s been more realization about how the data can be leveraged to make workflow more efficient around the game.”
“This type of initiative really opens the doors to do more things at the venue,” he said. “At the Pro Bowl last year, we had a display up that showed what players were on the field. By putting up what players were on the field in real time, it really gave fans more information.”
RFID data currently limited to post-game analysis
As part of its Internet of Things (IoT) initiative, the NFL is partnering with Illinois-based Zebra Technologies, a company that was founded in 1969 and which makes and markets a variety of different tracking, marking and printing technologies, including RFI smart label printers, thermal barcode label and receipt printers, and card and kiosk printers, according to CIO.
Zebra entered the IoT field in 2013, and one of the new products it launched at that time was the MotionWorks Sports Solution system that will be used by the pro football league. The company claims that their tags are capable of “blinking” up to 85 times per second, and that it takes about 120 milliseconds between the time a tag blinks on the field for the data it collects to be delivered to a server with low latency. The location data is said to be accurate to within six inches.
Every NFL venue will be connected to a central command center located in San Jose, California, Jill Stelfox, vice president and general manager of location solutions at Zebra Technologies, told CIO. “When the data is collected in the stadium, it’s sent in the stadium to the broadcaster in the stadium – it never leaves the stadium from a broadcaster perspective – but it’s also distributed out to the NFL cloud,” she added. The entire process just a few seconds.
Swensson said that the technology will not be available during games just yet. “Initially, it’s really more of the post-game,” she said. “Right now, we have a lot of stuff going on on the sidelines. It could just be too much of a distraction during the game. It might be a place we get down the line, but right now it’s not what we’re trying to solve for.”
The information will be available to coaches and player who could review it following a game to evaluate their own or their team’s performances, and could also be used for training. “We’ve just scratched the surface of what we can do with the data,” Swensson told the website. “Every week there’s another thought about how we can expand upon the information we’ve pulled together.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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