Australia: Catapult Sports introduces a new line of elite wearables named Catapult Vector which is the first to combine communication with satellite navigation for outdoor tracking and ultra-wideband capabilities for indoor use.
“The most unique thing about this device is no one is doing both GPS and local positioning, or LPS as we’d call it, in one device,” said Rod Lindsell, Catapult’s product director for elite wearables.
the Vector blends the two technologies while also fitting into a tracker that is 20 percent smaller than its elite outdoor predecessor, the OptimEye S5. Vector clips into a harness garment that has ECG sensors woven into the fabric, so that the device also monitors heart rate without the need for a supplementary strap.
The project builds on five years of research and consultation with elite sports teams, and, by the time Vector is released, the device will have been in development in earnest for 18 months. Vector builds on the various components already in the Catapult product line, of which many have come via outside acquisition of companies such as GPSports and PlayerTek.
Even for clubs that don’t install the ClearSky UWB signal-receiving anchors, Vector promises better satellite signals inside stadiums due to an optimized Global Navigation Satellite System chip.
“Lots of GPS companies now can deliver GPS data, but what they can’t deliver is high levels of performance in-stadium,” he added. “If we look at many elite teams, it’s quite often they’re training and also playing their matches in moderately obstructed environments. With this device, it wasn’t just about GPS in open environments, it was all about great GPS performance in these obstructed environments.”
Along with Vector, Catapult is also releasing a new suite of cloud-based analytics dashboards for mobile devices to facilitate real-time digestion of the information. This replaces the onerous prior setup that required a local data receiver and laptop. Lindsell estimated that half of all users review data in real time, a number he expects to climb to 70 or 80 percent.
