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When you open your Christmas present this year it might not be obvious that you are helping a revolution in sports science. Some of the most popular presents are likely to be mobile phones, games consoles and computer games and the modern stocking filler now contains more sensory technology than an early space mission. The accelerometer chip that prompts your phone to create light-sabre sounds as you swing it is the same technology that we use to help train the world’s best athletes.
Over the past couple of years I have been quite busy speaking about the role of technology in disability sport at numerous science festivals and conferences. South Africa’s ground breaking decision to select the bi-lateral amputee, Oscar Pistorius, to compete at the IAAF World Championships in South Korea has prompted me to finally write a new blog post on the topic.
I am a huge supporter of disability sport and have been privileged to attend the past two Paralympic Games. I also lead a major Cultural Olympiad project called Extraordinary Moves that aims to challenge perceptions of disability through the creation of a new body of provocative artworks. Furthermore, through academic research I have tried to understand why some performance enhancing technologies are permitted, whilst other are prohibited. Perhaps I am somewhat qualified to comment on this highly emotive issue.
This series of posts looks at the Kinect as a potential tool for analysis in Biomechanics. Previously we explored the quality of algorithms which detect a user’s body segments, finding real potential should the appropriate tools be developed. The power of the Kinect comes from its ability to ‘see’ depth, every point on an image can be resolved according to its distance from the Kinect camera. The corresponding point cloud drives many of the amazing functions which give the device so much potential. This post focuses on the point cloud data which can be extracted from the Kinect and work we’ve done to exploit it for Biomechanics.
The depth information from the MS Kinect, colour coded according to distance from sensor
The Hardware
Dubbed ‘the fastest selling electronic product in history’, Microsoft’s Kinect has clearly captured the attention of the gamer. The market was fundamentally changed by Nintendo and the Wii, the Kinect is Microsoft’s attempt at a user-friendly, demographic spanning input device. While the Wii takes signals from a hand-held ‘Wii-Mote’, the Kinect does away with controllers completely.
Recently, I received an email from Inside the Games, an online newsletter used to keep people up-to-date on the London 2012 Olympics and other events. It had the following headline:
Rawlinson removes breast implants to help win Olympic gold in London
With only this to go on, I was confused because the only Rawlinson I could think of was Chris Rawlinson the male Commonwealth gold medalist in the 400m. Momentarily my mind raced away with questions: Has he come out of retirement? Has he got implants? Why? Of course he should remove them, they could only be a hindrance to running surely?
Figure 1. Jana Rawlinson earlier this year
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