Summer time is the season for sports and this year we had two major events happen; The FIFA World Cup and Wimbledon. Millions of people had their eyes glued to the screen watching the events unfold. While people cheer for their favorite athletes or teams, and while this might spark tension between fans, there is one thing all sports viewers can agree on: Referees and Umpires sometime make horrid decisions!
When Judges Judge Poorly
How many times have you watch a game or a tennis match, or any other sport that requires a referee, and found yourself screaming at the television set due to a wrongful foul or an erroneous decision from the ref? It happens in almost every single game.
For those who actually follow a sport passionately, instances like that rob great teams of championships and up until now these Umpires or Referees remained mostly unchallenged in their call.
One would think that with technology we would be able to avoid things like that from happening but as it turns out, technology is only now catching up with mainstream sports.
Wearable Apps in Football
Probably one of the more exciting apps directly focused on helping Refs with their job is the GoalControl-4D which is a German based system that uses multiple angled cameras to indicate whether the ball actually crossed the goal line or not. Essentially the app uses 14 high speed cameras mounted around the pitch which provides a staggering goal detection accuracy of up to 5 mm. When the ball does cross the goal line the ref is messaged straight to his watch which will allow him to provide accurate calls at least when it comes to goals. I’m sure in the near future they will probably map out the virtual border of the playing field to help with off side calls, line outs and corner kicks as well.
Also in Mexico, Telmex is hosting one of the biggest Football (soccer) competitions in the world and this year they made headlines not because of the sheer volume of players, but due to the fact that they are implementing ‘Smart Devices’ on the playing field.
In the attempt of removing the traditional pen and paper approach to refereeing, they are attaching smart devices with custom built apps to allow a referee to jot down information and even signal a foul by merely waving the device in the air.
By doing this, they free up the Referee to do what he is supposed to do, be the impartial judge of the match instead of jotting down the statistics of the game.
More importantly, the margin of error greatly decreases due to the fact that the App will instantly send the information to a central hub where it will be digitally interpreted to provide match statistics and so on. What this does is eliminate the ‘human factor’ and frees up the mental focus of the Ref to truly do his job.
Tennis Applications
There are a few applications that are in development for Tennis umpires as well. These apps will work similarly to the football apps as it will also streamline the information directly to a central hub where the information can be translated and posted on websites and the rest of the net effortlessly. The need to write down statistics is quickly vanishing from mainstream sports.
By automating this aspect of the Umpire’s responsibilities you eliminate statistical errors and provide real time feedback on the athlete’s performance. As you can imagine from a scientific perspective this information will do a great deal to improve our understanding of sports and the players.
Currently the main focus of these apps are merely to diminish the time and effort into manually adding in match statistics, one of these days we could potentially see applications that will be able to provide live feeds from multiple cameras to assist in making fairer decisions for umpires.
This is only the beginning, I’m certain that app development, wearable tech and major sports will become much bigger ‘buddies’ over the years to come.
Different Apps for Different Sports
Surely there are plenty of you out there that have a real interest in reviewing these apps for yourselves and so I have gone to the liberty of creating a short list of apps for different sports.
Football
Referee Pro – iTunes Link or Android Link
Tennis
Match Scorer – www.matchscorer.com
Baseball
MLB at the Bat – iTunes Link
Basketball
Playbook for Coaches – iTunes Link or Android Link
Nike + Basket Ball – Great for Stats within games. iTunes Link
Rugby
Rugby Referee – Android Link
Cricket
Cricket Clicker – iTunes Link or Android Link
Do you know of any other Apps that didn’t make the list?
By: Narges Berry
