Will RFID snowboard see the light of the day?

Filed in archive Sports on March 13, 2009

My coach has promised to me that by next winter I would definitely hone my snowboarding skills and I simply looked at him in amazement as I feel that in this lifetime I may not be able to even become an amateur snowboarder. He gave me a wide grin and I had to literally coax him into revealing as to how he would be able to achieve the impossible feat.

He sat next to me and said it is something which would be made possible by technology to which you have been related to for a while and I blurted out, is it RFID?? To this he pondered for a minute and nodded in affirmation. This was the start of an interesting discussion which lasted till midnight and ended when his wife called him wondering about his whereabouts.

I hope till now even you might have got interested as to how RFID could be used with tough sports like snowboarding. Thinking very much on the lines of telemetry, Abatec researchers wanted to use RFID to track every movement of a snowboarder and gain as much information as possible which could be put to use for the benefit of the sportsmen. Here RFID sensors will be placed on the snowboard and information collected will be transmitted to the data center and visualized by the trainer to improve the snowboarding skills of the boarder the next time he or she goes down the slope. Now you may have started to feel that your mistakes would be pinpointed at an early stage which would mean a better snowboarder in days to come but this wont be easily to achieve as dozens of receivers will be required to be planted at each and every slope apart from processing power to calculate the data delay which makes me feel that that this concept would never venture out of the boardroom because of the costs involved but the company states that the price would be well within reach. If this turns out to be true then the day is not far away when each and every sports on earth would be using RFID in whichever capacity it would be possible and that probably would be a win-win situation for everyone.