Athlete Performance And Fatigue Monitoring Goes To A New Level: Zephyr Team System

Main Category: Sports Medicine / Fitness
Article Date: 03 Oct 2008 - 5:00 PDT

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Zephyr Technology Ltd has announced the release of its BioHarness Team System. The system means that coaches and trainers can now monitor the physiology of up to 64 of their athletes in the field, in real-time, during training and games.

Zephyr's patented breathing rate and heart rate technology is enabling coaches to test and monitor fitness and fatigue in their athletes via anaerobic thresholds, which greatly assists the setting and monitoring of training and recovery programs. In environments where athletes need to perform consistently on a week-by-week basis, this is proving critical.

The extra visibility made possible by measuring multiple vital signs over and above simple heart rate is allowing coaches and trainers a more complete tool to help them avoid over training or under training their athletes, and even in the prevention of critical player welfare issues such as heat stroke.

According to Dr Dan Garza, Stanford University, "Balanced training volume and intensity, gauged with a variety of physiological parameters, continues to be a target from both performance and player health perspectives. The ability to provide real-time wireless feedback for athletes, coaches and medical staff represents an important and powerful step towards this goal"

The Team System is built on Zephyr's patented BioHarness device which uses smart fabrics and state of the art electronics, developed in conjunction with NASA and US Special Operations.

While sports teams have a commonly recognised use for the Team System, its applicability is not limited to that field. "This extra visibility provided by the BioHarnessTM, and the all-round versatility of the system has seen the Team System being used in not only sporting, but also First Responder and Military training situations", says Brian Russell, Zephyr's CEO. "The Duty-of-Care responsibility is proving to be as large a motivator as the athletic performance of a fire chief's trainees, or a military commander's recruits when it comes to physiological monitoring in real-time".

Zephyr Technology Ltd