Smart Shirt Keeps Tabs On Athletes In Real Time

Athletes get paid a lot of money to make sure that the watching masses all over the country are entertained. More than that, though, they get paid a lot of money to do what they love to do. But, one of the easiest ways for all of that to come crashing down is exhaustion, which can, in turn, lead to injury. In baseball, for example, a pitcher's life –and career– is wholly centered around that throwing arm of his (or hers). So, what if there was a way to track how that pitcher was doing in real time?

Thanks to three engineering students based out of Northeastern University, they've come up with a way to do just that. Albeit, for the time, it's forced to be hardwired to a computer, but the students are working on making it wireless soon. Stripped to the bare bones, you're looking at an Under Armor shirt, that's been retrofitted with a grid of conductive threads and sensors. As the data is logged into the machine, coaches can watch as their players fatigue in real time, and then judge how that fatigue is effecting the particular player.

Which, hopefully, will mean that those coaches can stop their players from getting injured. There's no telling how long it would take something like this to actually be implemented in a real game, if it ever would be at all, but we'd like to think that something like this would actually be adopted with all that millions of dollars being spent on the sport, anyway. Anything to make our major league players safer while they're doing what they're doing.

[via Gizmodo]