Experimental Study of Mobility in the Soccer Field With Application to Real-Time Athlete Monitoring

Live monitoring of athletes during sporting events can help maximize performance while preventing injury, and enable new applications such as referee-assist and enhanced television broadcast services. A major challenge is the extraction of athlete physiological data in real-time, since the radio range of body-worn sensor devices is limited, necessitating multi-hop routing mechanisms. However, little is known about the highly dynamic operating conditions on a soccer field under which communication protocols need to operate. In this paper, the authors conduct field experiments in which they outfit first-division soccer players with sensor devices and record their inter-connectivity during a real game.