An innovative sensor data collection tool
for educational and sport activities.
The InLOT system is an innovative sensor data collection tool designed for use in the educational and sports environments, that provides the teacher or the trainer with the means to monitor the student or athlete performance during specific physical activities, take corrective actions and follow-up the progress of the student or athlete during a certain time period or a full season. The system makes use of the most advanced wireless communication technologies based on the ΙEEE 802.15.4 standard to acquire physiological data, such as heart rate (ECG), respiration rate, external body temperature and body acceleration as well as hand and/or leg acceleration information from up to six (6) students/athletes at the same time.
In order to widen the scope of physical activities, that can be monitored, a suitably modified ball with an embedded 3-dimensional acceleration sensor can also be incorporated into the InLOT system allowing for the study and analysis of more composite actions and movements, that readily take place in common sports, such as football, basketball, volleyball, etc.
All sensor data acquired in the course of a physical activity are stored in the InLOT monitoring station, where they can be :
- displayed and analyzed off-line.
- further processed to derive additional parameters characterizing the student/ athlete effort and performance level.
Further to this, the InLOT monitoring station software allows the user to observe in real-time the values and associated waveforms from selected sensors of selected students/athletes or ball(s) participating into the physical activity under observation.
InLOT SYSTEM USER INTERFACE
The user interface of the InLOT software is
simple and intuitive. At the beginning of
each event the user needs only to define :
The number of students or athletes
participating into the activity.
The sensors assigned to each participating
student or athlete.
If there is going to be a ball or not in the
activity.
Subsequently, after the students or athletes activate their sensors, the user initiates the data capturing
process and selects the sensors to be displayed in real-time. At the end of the activity the user saves the
captured data in a log file, which can then load at any time to:
Zoom in at selected time sections of the data waveforms.
Choose algorithms to calculate additional physical parameters related to the specific activity.
Create suitable forms to export graphs to other external applications, such as Microsoft Excel.
The InLOT monitoring software can run in any standard laptop or desktop PC with dual core processor
under Windows XP operating environment and a minimum of 1GB RAM and 80GB HDD.
InLOT SYSTEM BUILDING BLOCKS
A full InLOT system consists of the following hardware and software components :
