Lo scritto concerne i nuovi sviluppi nelle tecnologie applicate allo sport e i loro effetti sulle attività sportive.
The new frontiers of technologies applied to sports The analysis is about the new trends in technologies applied to sports and their effects on sports activities.
Technologies ensuring innovation in sports come in various forms, driven by the need for continuous renewal [1]. From athletes using social media to connect with their fans to communities of sportsmen and women on the net, confidence arises in technology and its ability to increase the efficiency of sports activities and offer competitive advantages [2]. Such technologies are, therefore, extraordinarily innovative and suitable to be employed in various ways since sports have essential connections with other fundamental economic sectors, such as health, education and tourism [3].
There are three main categories of technologies used in the sports industry [4]. The first category includes technologies to improve sports activity and athletes’ performance. Examples are wearable sensors, “smart” sports equipment, and technologies to evaluate athletes and create programs for their training. The second category comprises technologies for organising and managing sports events, applied to locations where sports events are held, and used in media and commercials. Finally, the third category presents technologies providing services to fans. This includes technologies used to broadcast news about sports events, social platforms allowing fans to interact with each other, sports betting systems, and, finally, “fantasy sports”, simulation games where participants build virtual teams representing real players in professional sports.
Based on their function, technologies used in sports can be further distinguished into technologies at the base of athletes’ development, technologies dedicated to fan engagement, technologies for the creation of a “smart stadium”, technologies applied to health and wellness, technologies involved in eSports and gaming, and, finally, technologies to broadcast news about sports events.
Sport is a complex system, so we must first introduce this concept to understand the developments of new technologies applied to sports. In a linear system, distortions, turbulences, and chaotic phenomena do not come into play. In contrast, a complex system is a dynamical system composed of many subsystems interacting with each other through nonlinear relationships, making the evolution of the system’s behaviour difficult to predict. It is impossible to follow a reductionist approach, decomposing and analysing such a system as a sum of its parts. The behaviour of a complex system cannot be understood from the behaviour of the system’s components because they are many, interact with each other and chaotic phenomena occur. The greater the quantity and variety of relationships between the elements of a system, the greater its complexity.
In the past, sports were analysed through time series analysis. A time series is a sequence of observations ordered concerning time. Time series analysis studies the past evolution of a phenomenon to identify any regularity in its [continua..]
