An Internet of sport architecture based on emerging enabling technologies

Sports and recreational activities provide an interesting domain of research that includes several of the critical challenges for next generation of services. The adoption of emerging Internet of Things technologies into the field of sport could significantly improve the sport experience and also the safety level of team sports. To this purpose, this paper presents a novel Sport System based on the jointly use of different technologies, such as RFID, WSN, Cloud, and mobile. It is able to collect, in real time, both environmental parameters and players' physiological data via an ultra-low-power Hybrid Sensing Network (HSN) composed of 6LoWPAN nodes integrating UHF RFID functionalities. Sensed data are delivered to a Cloud platform where a monitoring application makes them easily accessible via REST Web Services. A simple proof of concept has demonstrated the appropriateness of the proposed system. This work represents a first real attempt to demonstrate the benefits introduced by the use of IoT technologies in sport environments.