NFL and college football teams often toggle practice between their indoor facilities and outdoor fields all in the same session. Global soccer clubs may practice on a sprawling complex of grass fields but compete within the confines of high-walled, mass-capacity stadiums. In both cases, a wearable tracking device might work in one situation or the other but never both.
That was the problem Catapult Sports sought to solve with its new line of elite wearables, Vector. The Catapult Vector is the first to combine communication with satellite navigation for outdoor tracking and ultra-wideband capabilities for indoor use.
“The most unique thing about this device is no one is doing both GPS and local positioning, or LPS as we’d call it, in one device,” said Rod Lindsell, Catapult’s product director for elite wearables.
Furthermore, the Vector blends the two technologies while also fitting into a tracker that is 20 percent smaller than its elite outdoor predecessor, the OptimEye S5. Vector clips into a harness garment that has ECG sensors woven into the fabric, so that the device also monitors heart rate without the need for a supplementary strap.
“That’s been the engineering challenge,” Lindsell said. “As the team will say, I kind of wanted it all.”
Vector will receive a full release in May with a soft launch to a few partners in April. Catapult is consolidating its offerings under this new brand. The hybrid indoor/outdoor device will be the Vector S7. An outdoor-only GPS product will be the Vector X7 (and G7 for soccer goalkeepers). The standalone indoor offering will receive a 2020 release date under the T7 name, building off the existing ClearSky T6.
The project builds on five years of research and consultation with elite sports teams, and, by the time Vector is released, the device will have been in development in earnest for 18 months. Vector builds on the various components already in the Catapult product line, of which many have come via outside acquisition of companies such as GPSports and PlayerTek.
Athlete compliance and usability were driving forces behind Vector’s creation. Requiring separate devices for indoor and outdoor workload tracking is a hassle for both athletes and their sports science or performance staffs. The same goes for heart-rate monitoring, which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the upper echelons of sports, yet can require strapping on a second device.
Even for clubs that don’t install the ClearSky UWB signal-receiving anchors, Vector promises better satellite signals inside stadiums due to an optimized Global Navigation Satellite System chip. Lindsell said “subpar data is just unacceptable” and, no matter how small the product is or how many features it contains, the results need to be precise in an elite market. Vector is designed to work in all three settings: open field, stadium, and indoor facility. Most of the validation testing was conducted in historically challenging GPS environments, Lindsell said.
“Lots of GPS companies now can deliver GPS data, but what they can’t deliver is high levels of performance in-stadium,” he added. “If we look at many elite teams, it’s quite often they’re training and also playing their matches in moderately obstructed environments. With this device, it wasn’t just about GPS in open environments, it was all about great GPS performance in these obstructed environments.”
The stadium component is particularly relevant as more clubs want access to the data in real-time rather than just collecting it for later study. FIFA permitted clubs to utilize live tracking data for the first time prior to last summer’s World Cup. Vector has already received approval for use in FIFA- and World Rugby-sanctioned matches.
Along with Vector, Catapult is releasing a new suite of cloud-based analytics dashboards for mobile devices to facilitate real-time digestion of the information. This replaces the onerous prior setup that required a local data receiver and laptop. Lindsell estimated that half of all users review data in real time, a number he expects to climb to 70 or 80 percent.
Catapult has endeavored to be more than just a wearable provider and to democratize its technology for amateur athletes, but elite trackers first catalyzed the Melbourne-based sports performance company’s growth. And this upcoming release marks a new era in its history.
“We wanted to pick a name that was relevant to what we do, and we generally go to an elite, educated market, particularly at the top,” Lindsell said. “’Vector’ resonates with science, and mathematics, and measurement, and direction, and we felt that was well-placed to represent our new product as well as turn over a new leaf in Catapult.”