Major sports leagues and sporting events have turned to technology solutions to help athletes, improve coaching and engage fans in new ways as the global market for sports technology is expected to amass a revenue of nearly $41.8 billion by 2026.

CES 2022 exhibitor Xsens Technologies is bringing the power of wearable sensors into the sports technology world to change the way athletes and teams train, recover and engage audiences.

Next-Level Training

Xsens’s MVN Analyze — a full-body motion capturing system — allows coaches and athletes to understand the nuances of a movement and break down the biomechanics in a sport. This enables athletes to make the necessary adjustments to their movements or positions as they train, ultimately improving their game.

For example, as professional Olympian athletes prepare for the debut of sport climbing in the coming 2021 Tokyo Olympics — rescheduled from 2020 — Xsens’s MVN Analyze can help the climbers adapt their technique to be best suited for the lead, speed and boulder sections of the sport.

Xsens motion sensor suits accurately measure the distance between climber and wall, record each limb movement and pinpoint habits that are otherwise only identifiable through memory.

Road to Recovery

Xsens technology also assists health care professionals in understanding their patients’ physiological movements. Sports-injury clinic Pro-F leverages Xsens to inform its therapies and assessments with instantaneous data.

Being able to track and analyze each muscle movement while a patient is performing a simple jump, for example, helps the therapists determine the patient’s stability, the chance of reinjury based on body position, and other physical risks.

With video or simple human sight alone, nuances such as patients favoring one side of their body to avoid aggravating an injury would be difficult to spot and may cause further injury down the line.

Engaging the Fans

In 2017, O2 partnered with M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment and Xsens user Happy Finish for the Wear the Rose experience, allowing fans to engage in the championship games with virtual reality (VR). The Wear the Rose experience allows viewers to challenge the England Rugby team and test their skills.

The Xsens MVN system helped capture the movements of the players to best inform the computer-generated image, so that when a player is running in the VR experience, it is the most accurate portrayal. Xsens provided a robust system that could survive the tackles and nimble movements both without compromising the motion capturing data.

The VR experience enabled by Xsens allowed fans to gain a new level of engagement with the players, up close and personal.

The Xsens team joined us at the all-digital CES 2021 to debut MotionCloud, and are set to return to CES 2022.