Paul Rouse: Fashion, fad, or hindrance — is wearable technology the future of sport?

FORM GOGGLES: As you swim, the technology in the goggles throws up a commentary on your performance, presenting you with information on your progress and instructions for what you should do next.

Modern sporting performance depends on technology. Mostly, we try and hide this basic fact and focus on the human aspect of performance. This is understandable but there is no denying how technological change has allowed for sporting advance.

One of the things that defines modern sport is the idea of the keeping of records. This is something that extends from the world records set or chased by elite athletes down across the various levels of sporting competition and also ultimately to the desire of individuals to best their own earlier performances.

So it is that no elite athlete now runs barefoot or swings a wooden racket or cycles a steel bike.

The invention and then the use of polyurethane swimsuits just over a decade ago saw significantly enhanced performance and the breaking of world records in ways that suggested the technology used had been essential to what was now possible.

And as sporting technology always reflects the age in which it is used, the leap into internet and digital technologies has inevitably become more and more central to sporting endeavour.

So it is, that in the times that we live in, even swimming goggles can no longer just be swimming goggles. They are not now just things that stop your eyes being blinded by water, they now also are generators of — and screens for — information. There’s a new make of goggles called FORM.

As you swim, the technology in the goggles throws up a commentary on your performance, presenting you with information on your progress and instructions for what you should do next.

What happens is that you pay a monthly fee for “membership”, buy the goggles and download the app. This will set you back more than €200 but will allow you to see on your goggles, while you are swimming, your distance, split times, stroke rate and other performance metrics.

The claims are that this will help you swim smarter in order to swim faster. By receiving real-time reports of your workout you will apparently be able to “unlock limitless motivation and potential”.

The app also contains hundreds of coach-designed workouts and — naturally — the ability to share your workout performance on social media.

The goggles fit into the rapidly expanding sector of “wearable technology”. This comes in the form of electronic devices which are worn on or close to the body during sport or exercise. The devices collect, organise and transmit information concerning the state of the body. They are increasingly being used in sport to provide in-competition or in-training information on performance.

Things that are measured include heartbeat, calories burned, distance covered and much else.

Will it improve sporting performance? This is something that can be considered in terms of elite athletes and the hinterland of people who compete at lower levels, or who just exercise.

All across the elite sporting world there is a dramatic increase in the use of wearable technologies that track basic metrics of performance.

The logic of usage is that wearable technology should allow an increasingly information-based approach to such matters as pre-, intra- and post-event analysis of individual competitors, and of teams.

Data provided by wearable technology is increasingly being systematised, personalised and managed through real-time information feedback to improve both technique and efficiency of effort. This is being done, for example, in coaching boxers in their technique and not just in terms of monitoring their physical output.

Such data can also be extremely useful in managing workload for sports people. One of the successful uses of GPS systems by Gaelic football teams is the ability to pull players from the field who are at acute risk of injury. Nobody can seriously argue against the merit of that.

But — in the round — having more information does not, of course, necessarily equate to progress. One of the great challenges in sport is how to use information, how to sift through evidence, prioritise what is considered most relevant and use this as an aid to enhance performance. There is effort involved in collecting data that is accurate, but it is wasted effort and needless expense if it is not accompanied by a capacity for analysis and then by the accuracy of application of the decision that are made on the evidence that emerges.

A good example of this is the Teslasuit — this is a full-body sensor monitoring suit that can actually coach athletes as they perform. For instance, one of the things the suit does is that it sends an electrical impulse to alert the wearer to a poor baseball swing.

The Nextiles KineticPro Sleeve does something similar for pitchers in baseball in that data is tracked from the arm and fed by Bluetooth to a smartphone.

There is a claim at the heart of wearable technology that demands testing, however. It is the notion that by recording performance, sport can be turned into a calculable science. The apparent capacity to investigate the minutiae of what is happening is terms of technique and physical output is what underpins this claim. And it is something that is obviously attractive to anyone active in competitive sport.

Obviously, physiological matters are only one aspect of performance. The great question is how real-time data on performance in entwined with the emotional aspect of sport. How do the emotions cope with the stream of information that comes in the middle of performance? We know already that human behaviour is being changed by the use of Artificial Intelligence in various areas of our lives. How will it change sporting behaviour?

In particular, will it lead to a loss of emotional engagement — an outcome that will surely diminish the experience and the spectacle.

There is another aspect that matters. And it particularly relates to non-elite sport.

We should not forget that fashion plays an essential part in all of this. The adoption by an elite athlete or team of some form of sporting equipment is ordinarily the precursor to its dispersal across the wider sporting world.

It is in this space that vast sums of money are to be made. The most visible widespread instance of this happening is through the sale of smartwatches over the past decade.

The thing is: what comes into fashion has a great tradition of exiting as quickly. This is something that can also be tracked. Studies across the academic world have repeatedly tracked the manner in which wearable technologies are adopted by people who are seeking to enhance their sport or exercise.

This has been facilitated by the ubiquity of smartphones.

For example, people who are attempting to increase their levels of physical exercise in order to lose weight and gain fitness regularly adopt various forms of technology to aid exercise and diet.

The studies show the manner in which the adoption of these technologies does indeed bring positive results.

But the studies also show that retention rates are low. That is to say, once the novelty that is associated with the initial adoption of the device wears off, people often stop using them.

There is something very human in that.

But there is something else that also bears asking: the mental release that comes from physical exercise is something essential to health. How is that helped by having numbers in front of your eyes when you are swimming? In what way does it enhance enjoyment of the exercise?

It feels likely that many pairs of these goggles will be sold. They will surely be adored by some and abandoned by many others. That is, of course, besides the ones that aren’t lost.

- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.