Gone are the days when you could be a high-end athlete with nothing more than a pair of shorts, good track shoes and lots of talent.

Today’s elite runners, swimmers and ski racers are going to need an extra suitcase to carry around their high-tech toys. I know, because I’ve spent the last two weeks hooked up to the tip of the high-tech athletic iceberg. I’ve also seen the future of elite sports, at least according to experts at Bell.

A few weeks ago, Carter Kagume of Calgary Technologies Inc. approached me with a proposal that she said would be “a lot of fun.” It turned out I was to be outfitted with a high-tech activity monitoring pod (AMP) that would track my every step before and during Stampede Week.

The hypothesis was that Calgary’s annual pancake- eating fest is actually healthy for us, presumably because we go racing from party to party. You can visit the Wireless City website to find out if this actually happened.

Officially, it wasn’t a competition among the 11 subjects. Yeah, sure. I was pretty confident that I could beat Mayor Dave Bronconnier, but the subjects also included a runner and a five-year-old who turned out to be stiff competition. So, I was careful to wear the pod for every step, even if I was only going to the bathroom The AMP is the brainchild of Cochrane-based Dynastream Innovations Inc. The privately held company is headed by Kip Fyfe, brother of University of Alberta professor Ken Fyfe, who did pioneering work on measuring the movements of elite athletes. Now, Dynastream is selling the entry-level AMP device directly into the consumer market at around $325 each.

Mike Sturk photo, Business Edge
Calgary Technologies’ Carter Kagume outfits Tom Keenan with an activity monitoring pod (AMP).

The pod straps onto your ankle, and unlike the pedometers you get in cereal boxes, it can’t be fooled by shaking. You don’t have to tell it how long your strides are, since it has inertial sensors that compute everything from step length to walking speed to estimated calories burned.

The AMP became my constant companion. I found myself checking it several times a day, amazed at how far I was locomoting. My least favourite moment came at the 2,311-metre summit of Mount Carthew in Waterton National Park. I had already logged more than 25,000 steps and 16 kilometres by noon, and I had another 12 km in front of me. I grinned, thinking of the Wireless City folks re-doing their charts, which max out at 20 km and 35,000 steps.

Then, I noticed the AMP’s screen was blank! Had I hiked too hard? Maybe it died while I was sliding down a snow patch? At least I knew I didn’t drown or freeze it. I had carefully removed it before my Shad Valley students and I jumped into the frigid waters of Carthew Lake. It turns out the battery had failed. The AMP was no longer recording steps; though I had saved the ones I did already. With a life of only 10 days on a AAA battery, the AMP feels more like a well-designed piece of medical research equipment than a ready-for-market consumer device.

The AMP may be here-and- now jock tech, but what about the future?

To celebrate its role as a sponsor of the Canadian Olympic team in the upcoming Games, telecom giant Bell is touring its TechnoSport Pavilion across Canada. The technology-laden trailer spent 10 days at the Calgary Stampede, and upcoming stops include Edmonton’s Odyssium, as well as locations in Toronto and Quebec City.

Visitors are handed a personal radio frequency identity (RFID) chip embedded in a cube with the Bell logo. They progress through a series of stations built on the premise that future athletes will be continuously connected. Bell figures they’ll have phones and PDAs with automatic GPS location ability.

According to Bell’s Tanya Oliva, “If Kelly Law, the skip of the curling team, wants to call a meeting with her players, she can use location-based services to find them and work out when they can all get together, automatically taking into account travel time.”

Oliva says that the vast majority of consumer phones sold by Bell now contain GPS technology and that you can already use that function to find things such as nearby restaurants. As for some of the other applications on display in the pavilion, she estimates “they could all come on the market in the next six to 18 months.”

The most entertaining station in Bell TechnoSport is a personal video-on-demand system called Know Me Show Me. The premise is that, rather than having mom and dad or the coach videotaping athletes and their competitors, everybody could share a giant video library. Using a broadband connection, athletes could view their own performances and see what they’re up against.

The coolest aspect of this is the use of JesterTek technology to select the video clips. Instead of a mouse or track ball, visitors place their hands into a frame that contains two web cameras, controlling a cursor with a wave of the hand.

Now, if you’re sick of e-mail from spammers, get ready for videomail! Bell predicts you’ll soon be “accessing videomail from a bus stop or a park bench.” At TechnoSport, you look through a ViewMaster kind of contraption and photos of your correspondents show up. When you hover over them, a video message is delivered. Just the thing for homesick athletes when they go to Athens.

One problem, though. Bell spokespeople admit that none of the technology being showcased in TechnoSport is actually going to be used in Athens. They say they’re trying to show us the future of sport, and also stake a claim at being a future sponsor of Canada’s Olympians.

Through this travelling show, Bell has managed to introduce concepts such as pervasive computing, gesture technology and Internet-enabled furniture in a cool way to lots of people. The pavilion is entertaining and non-threatening. Kids whip right through it, and even adults seem able to cope.

But if you’re the relative of an Athens-bound Olympic hopeful, you’ll probably have to be content with plain old e-mail and voicemail, and they might ask you to set the VCR to tape something for them.

Let’s just hope your machine isn’t flashing 12:00. If it is, ask one of those kids for help.

Web Watch:

www.wirelesscity.ca
www.dynastream.com
technosport.bell.ca

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)