With the rapid advances in sports technologies, athletes and sports coaches are constantly searching for improved performance assessment methods. Whilst athletic performances continue to improve, accurate training prescription and feedback is important to the consistency of the training outcome and maintaining the performance margin. To maximise the potential of UK athletes at future Olympics, Olympic Winter Games, and Paralympics, there is a pressing need to exploit the latest technical advances in sensing, materials, aerodynamics, biomechanics, and performance equipment design. In supporting the quest for gold in the London Olympics and Paralympics in 2012, UK Sports and EPSRC have identified a range of engineering and physical sciences disciplines that through the interaction with the sports community can generate innovative training solutions and sports equipment designs for gaining competitive advantage of the UK athletes. Such a synergy brings the opportunity not just to ensure success at the Games themselves, but to provide a sporting legacy that will underpin the long-term health and success of sport in this country. The purpose of this proposal is to investigate the use of miniaturised wireless Body Sensor Networks (BSN) for providing real-time feedback and in situ analysis of the biomechanical indices of the athletes during training. It is a feasibility project aimed at addressing the technical requirement of Sports-BSN hardware design, miniaturisation, packaging, as well as real-time data processing, sensor fusion, and data visualisation issues. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, UK Sport and nominated technical expertise working within the elite sport network (Dr Aki Salo, UK Athletics Speed specialist currently based at University of Bath).

A major problem in many physiological measurements is that the act of performing the measurement can itself alter the system that is under observation. The challenge for scientists is to develop techniques which allow the non invasive assessment of physiological processes. A technique called Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) has previously been used to measure the wavelength dependence of the optical absorption of blood and therefore its oxygen content (highly oxygenated arterial blood is bright red whilst oxygen depleted venous blood appears purple/blue in colour). In principle NIRS allows for the measurement of the oxygen saturation of the muscle. Muscles use oxygen to assist in the conversion of food energy (carbohydrate/fat) into the useable chemical energy that can drive muscle contraction and allow an athlete to run, cycle and swim. Exercise uses up oxygen and therefore how much oxygen is in the muscle (its oxygen saturation) is a measure of whether the oxygen being delivered is keeping up with its consumption. In aerobic exercise there is sufficient oxygen; in anaerobic exercise this is not the case. Achieving gold in the 2012 Olympics has become a top priority for UK Sport. There are many factors that will influence the position of Team GB in the medals table in 2012, including the development of optimised training regimes for elite athletes. Informed development of effective training strategies requires coaches to be given real time feedback on an athlete's performance at the trackside. Currently there is a scarcity of available devices that provide reliable and accurate physiological monitoring of elite athletes in the field. There are currently very few available methods which allow us to measure physiological changes in an athlete while they are training in the field. In theory NIRS methods could be used to measure muscle oxygenation in training athletes. However current commercial NIRS machines are large, heavy and non-portable.The aim of this feasibility project is to develop a non-obtrusive, battery driven, compact, NIRS device that measures local absolute muscle oxygen saturation and transmits this data via a wireless link to the coach in real time. Feedback from elite athletes and coaches at Essex (and via UK sport) will inform the design to ensure that the device will be acceptable to all athletes and will not compromise athletic performance. In parallel with the design of the prototype device we will be testing how the new technology could be used to enhance sports performance. We will focus initially on events, such as running and cycling, where it is easy to make complex biochemical and physiological measurements in the laboratory (using analysis of the exhaled air and measurements in blood samples). Our aim is to understand in detail the use of NIRS measurements in this laboratory setting using tests that attempt to recreate sporting events. Armed with this knowledge we will ultimately be able to apply the technology in the field during the training of an elite athlete. Of many possibilities we will initially focus on two uses for NIRS / optimising warm-up for athletes in sprint events and designing optimal pacing strategies (when to go fast and when to conserve energy) in endurance events. Beyond this feasibility study our long-term aim is to develop a device capable of providing a number of physiological measures for use in a wide range of sports and extreme environments including swimming and altitude training. Whilst we feel this device has the possibility of giving UK sport an edge in 2012, its manufacture will also be part of the Olympic post-2012 dividend, as it will have significant use in medical applications e.g. assisting paraplegics in improving muscle function and in investigating brain injury in patients.

To improve evaluation of physical performance and stamina in athletes undergoing rigorous training, it is necessary to expand our current armoury of physical monitoring tools beyond say pulse rate and respiratory gas exchange. We also lack true biochemical measures of physical endurance at the trackside; the problem has been partly that tissue and blood access are not acceptable in a well subject and also that simplified assay is not available. This proposal utilises thin film fabrication tools create multilayer electrode strips able to respond to O2 and to lactate. The former will be based on O2 going through intact skin by an in situ heater augment O2 transport out from the skin surface, and the latter will respond to lactate in saliva by means of an enzyme to break down lactate to generate a detectable hydrogen peroxide. There is accumulating data that salivary lactate, though low, reflects blood values. The overall aim is to achieve non-invasive, reagentless devices for sports medicine use. Specifically, transcutaneous O2 will give a measure of peripheral tissue O2 delivery and lactate will give a measure of the level of the tissue oxygen deficit during extreme activity.

There is now widespread recognition that it is possible to extract previously unknown knowledge from datasets using machine learning techniques. In particular, rule induction algorithms capture the structure of data in a form directly amenable to human understanding. This project will explore the utility of a form of rule induction which combines evolutionary computation with reinforcement learning to produce human-readable solutions to facilitate knowledge discovery with respect to race analyses of the British swimming team. The technique, known as the Learning Classifier System (LCS), has recently shown great potential for data mining problems. LCS, along with other machine learning approaches, will be used to explore athlete datasets provided by the collaborating coach of the British swimming team.

The ability to sustain muscular exercise is a key determinant of health, quality of life, and mortality. A low tolerance for exercise contributes to a downward spiral of inactivity, which is debilitating in the elderly and an actual cause of many chronic diseases. Therefore, a better understanding of the mechanisms that allow exercise to be sustained is central to our ability to help maintain health, quality of life and promote longevity. Sustaining muscular exercise depends on the body's ability to provide energy through 'oxidative', or aerobic, pathways. These are chemical reactions that synthesise energy through the consumption of oxygen. However, bodily stores of oxygen are very limited so at exercise onset the lungs, heart and muscles must respond in a coordinated fashion to transport oxygen from the atmosphere to where it is used in the active muscles. In healthy individuals the required increases in pulmonary ventilation, cardiac output, muscle blood flow, and muscle oxygen utilisation occur in a well coordinated fashion. However, to achieve this coordination the responses of these systems lag behind the energy demands by about 3 minutes in normal healthy subjects. The kinetics with which oxygen transport and utilisation can respond therefore determines whether or not the body is able meet the energy demands through oxidative pathways. Because demands for activity fluctuate throughout the day (e.g. walking, stair climbing, etc), the response kinetics of energy providing pathways have a significant impact on the ability to carry out the tasks of daily living. It is of considerable concern, therefore, that these response kinetics are very slow in the elderly, and take about twice as long to reach their requirement compared to young individuals. In the elderly therefore there is a greater high reliance on alternative routes of energy provision (termed anaerobic, because they don't consume oxygen). These are detrimental to exercise tolerance because they are related to increased muscle fatigue, shortness of breath and pain. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that physiological systems respond very rapidly in trained athletes. The mechanisms that determine the integrated responses of the pulmonary, circulatory and muscular systems, however, are currently unresolved. The studies in this proposal aim to improve our understanding of the interactions between oxygen delivery to, and utilisation in, the active muscles during the transition from rest to exercise. A better understanding of how these processes work will improve our ability to address the slow oxygen consumption kinetics in the elderly, as well as the optimisation of these processes in elite athletes. The experiments for these studies are organised into three tracks: 1) studies to elucidate how the kinetics of muscle fatigue and oxygen uptake contribute to limiting exercise tolerance in young, elderly and endurance trained subjects; 2) studies to elucidate how rates of aerobic and anaerobic energy provision are distributed throughout the active muscles; and 3) studies to generate a computer model to simulate energy provision and integrated physiological systems integration during exercise over a variety of conditions. All the experiments are made using non-invasive measurements during leg exercise in young (<30 years), elderly (>65 years) or elite endurance trained athletes (volunteers from the Great Britain cycling squad). The outcomes of this project will improve our understanding of how the body responds to the energy demands of physical activity, and how the provision and utilisation of oxygen is optimised to allow high work rates to be sustained. These studies will therefore underpin the development of new strategies (either pharmacological or exercise based) for ameliorating the mechanisms limiting exercise tolerance in humans, and thereby contribute to the maintenance of health, quality of life, and longevity.