he project titled “Desenvolvimento de uma unidade de medida inercial de baixo custo para controlo e avaliação do treino de nadadores” won the 2020 Sports Science Award, in the “Sports Training” category. The work is authored by the Técnico student Eduardo Félix, and his supervisors, professor Paulo Correia, (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering – DEEC and researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações – IT), and professor Hugo Silva (Department of Bioengineering – DBE and also IT researcher). The project was developed in partnership with professor Pedro Morouço (Polytechnic of Leiria).

“I am very proud of our work and of what we have achieved. It is always very rewarding to see our work recognised”, says Eduardo Félix. “To see our work being acknowledged by people outside Técnico is a great honour and works as an additional validation of the strategy we followed”, says professor Hugo Silva. Professor Paulo Correia stresses “it is very rewarding to work in a multidisciplinary team, in which everyone has always shown great commitment at work”.

The main idea of the award-winning project was to develop a system that would help coach and athlete in their day-to-day swimming training. “Something that would be practical, low cost, and provide the performance indicators needed to correct the athletes’ technique, thus improving performance”, explains Eduardo Félix. “The results obtained were very positive”, he adds. If, on the one hand, the accuracy of the developed algorithm ranged between 90% and 100% in the various performance indicators developed, on the other hand we have developed 3 new indicators never proposed before”, stresses Eduardo Félix. Professor Hugo Silva highlights “the alliance between science and engineering” as one distinctive feature of this project.

The research work has resulted in the development of a web application that allows, in a simplified way, the access to the data collected from the inertial measurement unit and the automated production of a session report.

Recalling that “in this area, all reliable devices are quite expensive, difficult to use and maintain”, Eduardo Félix explains that the team “used a low cost device that can be purchased by any athlete and also reaches very good results”. According to the student, “the quality-price-ratio of our project may have been one of the decisive factors for this distinction”.

Professor Paulo Correia says “the potential of the device and the system developed to easily accommodate new performance indicators and other types of analysis that may prove to be important” were also importante to win the award. “Collaboration with experts in swimming was very useful to design the prototype. We hope that new projects will allow us to continue the work and to validate developments”, says the DEEC professor.

“I believe that the“ whole product ”approach and the diversity of themes it addresses may have worked as an additional factor”, points out professor Hugo Silva. “This work presented end-to-end technical solutions, from aspects related to hardware applied to the athlete, signal processing, machine learning, and end user software, also comprising the theoretical foundations of the application domain”, he adds.

The idea of developing this project in the Sports Science area came from Eduardo Félix, who practiced swimming for many years. “After talking to my swimming coach, we have found that there was a gap in these types of devices in the swimming area, and I thought it might be useful to further explore this idea in my master’s thesis”, recalls the student.

“This project is the result of Eduardo’s intrinsic motivation, his great commitment and his technical capacity to execute it”, highlights professor Hugo Silva. “He was also able to bring together several converging interests of specialists in the field of swimming”, he adds.

It is important to highlight the impact that this work may have on athletes training, which can “be a great help to fix chronic technical problems of athletes”, stresses Eduardo Félix. “Both the coach and the athlete can analyse the mistakes and the various indicators available. It is a constant and consecutive work of analysis and improvement, which leads athletes to a substantial increase in performance in the long term”, says Eduardo Félix.

The Sports Science Awards are delivered annualy by the Portuguese Olympic Committee and Millennium BCP Foundation, in partnership with VISÃO magazine. The awards were created to encourage and reward the best research project developed in Portugal in Sports science.

The first place in each category receives a monetary prize of €5,000 and each honourable mention receives €1,000, as an incentive to continue the research work.