Running and IoT

Let me tell you one truth: very often IT has produced boring things. Tons and tons of information, with severe reports, transactional systems never-stopping-but-doing-always-the-same-thing.

Has it really changed our lives? Well, probably yes. In the past there was someone writing information on a group of papers. Now it is using a bright monitor and a keyboard. And you can search, search… if you know what you want to search.

Let’s talk about the real-world-changing technology.

Smartphone (and Apple, Google) have really changed our lives.

I live in a big town (Rome) and even if I’ve been here for more than 20 years (yes, we Italian are not so nomadic as in other countries), I don’t know all the roads. If I have to go somewhere I turn on my Google Maps App and et-voila…. a nice voice teach me where I have to turn.

IoT is already everywhere, even if you don’t know.

And the list of things that we will see is…. bigger than your imagination (for sure mine).

Now, let’s go back to the title.

I love running, and running is not only a sport. It is a science. If you train seriously you can easily figure out, with little uncertainty, what will be your time in your next race.

In every big race they give you a “chip” that you attach on your shirt. And in this way they track you at least at the beginning and the end of the track.

In most important races, like Rome Marathon (I have done it one, in 2012), they track your time every 5 km. And you can go online, during the race, and see what your friends are doing.

For now I think that the chip is only an RFID tag that is recognized by sensors put at the crossing-line. It is a matter of costs.

But, in the near future you can imagine that every racer will have its own “smart thing”, with its data. And enough computing and networking capabilities to capture and send more information real-time. For example, heart-rate. A MQTT message with all this data every minute, send over a 6LoWPan metropolitan network.

Sometime happens that someone has a problem. There are doctors along the path. But with real-time health data you can detect early signs of future problems and save lives.

This is what we should do.

By the way, I’m going to run “CorriRoma” race at the end of next week. I’ll tell you how it has gone.