Carnegie Mellon University has become a reference point in regards to technology innovation and all of its projects have surprised us so far with their original perspective on things. The latest idea that the teachers and students at CMU have come up with is related to American football, namely placing GPS systems in footballs and pressure sensors in gloves, so that all of the movements on the field can be properly identified in order to have a fair game.

Despite of the fact that in a football game there are referees and video cameras all over the court, there's always the possibility that certain moves aren't observed because of difficult angles. But with the technology that CMU wants to develop, nothing will escape judgment.

Dr. Priya Narasimhan and her students think they might be able to help right decisions being made during football games. Dr. Narasimhan is a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and she and her students are equipping gloves and a football with remote sensing technology to measure everything from grip and trajectory to speed and position.

It could also show such things as who actually has the ball in a pileup, whether a runner has crossed the goal line inside a mass of players and whether a receiver has control of the ball before he goes out of bounds.

Dr. Narasimhan teaches a course at Carnegie Mellon in "embedded real-time systems," which is a fancy way of describing the kind of touch sensors, GPS receivers and accelerometers that the students are putting to use. However, this project is more of a personal effort, caused by Dr.  Narasimhan's passion for football.

“You'd never want to replace the human referees because they make these calls based on years of experience, and no technology can replace that," she said. "But in addition to the instant replay, if you had a supplementary system that said this is exactly where the ball landed and where the player stopped with it, you could make these kinds of calls accurately,” Dr. Narasimhan added.

So far, she and her squad of undergraduate and graduate students have focused on two things: gloves with touch sensors that can transmit that information wirelessly to a computer, and a football equipped with a global positioning receiver and accelerometer that can track the location, speed and trajectory of the ball.

Eventually, the same kind of sensors used in the gloves could be adapted to shoes, to measure stride and running patterns, or even shoulder pads, to calculate blocking positions and force.

The current version of the glove has 15 touch sensors on the fingers and palm, running to a wireless module on the back of the arm. An animation on a computer screen shows which parts of the glove are in contact with the ball at any given time, symbolized by circles at the contact points.

The current prototype transmits information once a second and is only accurate to within 30 feet -obviously not good enough for practical application. A newer prototype, though, will transmit four times a second and will combine its data with information from fixed GPS receivers near the field to provide much tighter measurements.


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