FPGA: A different paradigm for sports monitoringhardware
D. D. Rowlands, Daniel Arthur James · 2013
Multi-sensor platforms have been applied to many sports to examine different aspects of an athlete’s performance. Inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes are now routinely being used to quantify an athlete’s movements and hence obtain a useful signature of the movement under examination [1,2]. These sensor platforms contain both software and hardware components. The software component typically takes two parts; the software to run on the hardware itself (firmware), and the software to access the data.The software can be easily modified to change the operation but is limited to the configuration of the hardware platform. The hardware components typically consists of a set of sensor (GPS, inertial sensors etc), a set of communications subsystems (USB, serial, WiFi), storage subsystems (memory card etc), interface subsystems (buttons, LEDs, screens etc), a microcontroller, and a power source (battery). This requires a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) to be designed, manufactured, and tested. If any changes or upgrades are required then this process needs to be repeated which means that it is not resource effective to create new hardware for different monitoring applications. Another issue is that the analysis of the data is limited to the speed and power usage of the microcontroller so complex algorithms etc are not commonly performed on the hardware but post processed later. These hardware platforms can either be custom designed allowing flexibility in the initial design but using a lot of resources, or bought as an off the shelf component with limited choice of sensors and other subsystems all of which reduce the possibility to target different monitoring situations. A different paradigm is to use a configurable hardware platform which can be changed for different applications and can allow the creation of different digital hardware circuits to perform analysis such as hardware based Fast Fourier Transforms etc. This configurable hardware system consists of a single PCB that contains the subsystems connected to a configurable unit that