SPÅT tracks youth basketball with Noccela UWB

SPÅT, the sports-analytics service of TKOMV Turku Oy, has used Noccela’s ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning to track athletes at the Nordic Open U16 basketball tournament at Kisakallio in Finland earlier this year. It takes a service that began on the football pitch to an indoor court sport.

From football to basketball

SPÅT started with football. GPS-based tracking systems were too expensive for junior teams, and base stations (UWB anchors) cannot be mounted above an open pitch. Noccela developed its positioning algorithms for sport so that base stations could stand in a line around the field instead of overhead. A football pitch that first needed 36 base stations is now covered with 16, without losing performance.

The resulting football analytics application shows the real-time positions and speeds of the players of several teams as maps and graphs. Read the SPÅT football analytics case study.

Set up by the coach

Because the base stations calibrate their own positions, a tracking system can be set up for a game or a tournament and taken down again. In sports set-ups, calibration is done by walking a tag to the corners of the field, without a floor plan or measured base station positions. The positioning is calculated in the cloud, so no computer is needed at the venue.

Why it matters

For junior teams, GPS-based tracking has often been too expensive. A system that a coach can set up and take down for each event brings the same kind of data to junior programmes, schools and tournaments.

Read more about UWB tracking for sports and animals and the Sports Beacon.