Sensor Season
Photo credit: Jeanette May
What do nurses, soldiers, and the Buffalo Bills all have in common? Radio frequency identification device technology. These tiny yet durable chips will soon be found in NFL uniforms across all 32 teams by requirement during select sporting events. This September will be the beginning of the season and it is sure to be a thrilling one.
There are 17 stadiums here in the U.S. that are equipped with receivers specific to the radio frequency needed to match the sensors. Once in use during future games they may provide coaches and broadcasters (once authorized by the Competition Committee) with important statistics associated with distance and speed of each individual being followed, et. al. Game-changing advances in technology bring hope of bringing a new competitive advantage to each team. This is only the half of it, however. Once the new data begins pouring in from game to game, how will it be stored and evaluated for predictive benefits? Data is essentially useless without a proper plan for storage and analysis. The Pushgraph platform, for example, can do far more than just give NFL affiliates information. Once fed data from the player devices and it can turn that information into comparative metrics and visualizations for simple evaluations of player to player statistics. Pushgraph is specifically designed to identify such patterns crucial to advanced planning and decision-making in the future. It will certainly be a different NFL than in years past. (2014 Phys.org)(2014 NFL.com)