Slashdot Mirror
Equine Speedometers
Makarand writes "According to this article in The New Zealand Herald
scientists at Massey University (NZ) are using
GPS to
monitor racehorses during their training programme. GPS technology is being used to follow horses around a racetrack and measure how far and fast horses gallop each day. This GPS data along with heart rate measurements is transforming racehorse training into a science."
Now not only do people destroy their family life savings with horse racing.
Now GPS help the horse race business go even higher tech. As if fantasy football and internet slot machine wasn't enough.
Next time we are at the racing track will we see m.p.h real-time as the race progresses?
AC
so will the speed be measured in furlongs per fortnight?
...when they can turn back the odometer on one of them.
...but haven't trainers been doing the exact same thing with stopwatches for decades? I really don't see what benefit GPS could add to the conditioning of race horces beyond the simple but effective technology of yesteryear.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
I've seen a telemetry system for horses about 15 years ago, that measured speed, heart rate, blood pressure and some other things.
These systems haven't become very widespread because of their cost... and even if we can make them really cheap, I'm not so sure what use it'll have. It's probably interesting to know a horse is running at x km/h, with a heart rate of y and blood pressure z, but what are you going to do with that information?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The greatest mammalian athlete of the last thousand years... the best there ever was, the best there ever will be... to borrow a quote attributed to another once-in-a-lifetime athlete...
Look it up. The horse was preternatural... with a heart more than DOUBLE the size of a typical champion thoroughbred...
When he won the Kentucky Derby in '73, Secretariat ran each successive quarter-mile FASTER than the previous one... this is simply unheard of in horse-racing...
A genetic zenith.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Just go to gpsports.com. The SPI 10 unit can do everything the horse unit can do, plus there is some nifty software so you can make pseudo-3D maps upon returning to your home PC after your workout, as well as altituted and barrometric pressure. Supposedly the unit averages multiple surveying techniques allowing an extremely accurate survey of speed. However, the price is quite steep. Expect to be shelling out at least 1500 bucks, plus more for software upgrades.
Since a horse may not be at a track all day, GPS makes tracking the horse's distance and speed much easier. Plus, there is very little infrastructure to install with a GPS system, whereas your system would need to have sensors installed. The sensors for GPS are already installed, for all of us.
Basically you would do the same thing the edurance athletes have been doing for a while. Since we know that certain heart rates correspond to aerobic or anaerobic exercise, you can make sure that the horse is training aerobically or anaerobically. Also using a heart rate monitor allows you to figure out if the horse is overtraining. With people, overtraining leads to elevations in their resting heart rates and problems in getting your heart rate up while exercising. I'm sure there are analogs in horses that can be used to monitor how hard a workout is for the horse and when the horse needs more time to recover.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
A smally nitpick: As someone who worked in the equine industry before I entered the tech world, I personally believe that horse racing is a science (in a broad sense), and always has been. *smiles*
I believe several posters hit an important point when they stated that they have been able to measure a horse's speed for years using stopwatches. However, they should consider that this technology is only as useful as the person pressing the button, and relies on the user to be able to determine *exactly* when that horse's nose touches the line, and for them to be able to press the stop button fast enough. This tool is extremely handy because, assuming it has great accuracy, it takes the human error problem out. You might not think that parts of a second would matter in horse racing, but it does. Fractions of a second came between breaking Secretariats (famous race horse) track record, and not. It is true that they have bream beams at the major tracks, but overall photo technology is used to determine split seconds, who won, etc., and often this is not available to trainers outside of a race. GPS will simplify that process.
However, my concern is that, having used this technology in a robot that we are working on, the readings are sometimes unreliable as one second it may say you are one place, and the next tell you that you are a foot the other way. That might not seem like a huge distance to you, but combine that with the 30+ mph galloping speed of a well-trained thoroughbred, and you have a problem when it reads the horse as finishing when it really has not. I would be interested in seeing how they address this problem. In horse racing, when gauging against track records, split seconds count!
I believe that a greater application of this technology would be to track those expensive animals in the case that they get stolen. They have been using a variant of RFID to do this for years, but it is limited in distance and thus rarely actually catches animals except at slaughterhouses where they are required to scan for a stolen animal. This might ease an insurance company's mind, and also the owner's, knowing that their animal can be tracked in-transit. Awesome.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
and you can "WarHorse" all of the wireless AP's at the racetrack.
We've got hobbits AND cyborg horses. Take THAT, Coalition of the Willing!
Timex is selling a device called the Bodylink that does all this: GPS + Data Recorder + Heart Rate Monitor.
This is what to expect with an autonomous GPS unit like the cheap $200 hand-held units you can get from Garmin or Magellan.
There are surveyor grade differential GPS units that have sub-centimeter accuracy.
The way these work is you first need to survey a position, in this case how about the center of the infield, to find its exact coordinates. You then set up a base station GPS unit exactly on top of this surveyed point. You enter the coordinates into the base station unit. Every second the base station gets a reading from the satellites and compares the solution it calculates with where it knows it actually is. The base station then broadcasts this difference to the roving GPS unit. The rover takes the solution it has derived and applies the difference it receives from the base station, and voila, an extremely accurate fix of your position.
Assuming the track invested in having a monument surveyed in the outfield and maintains the base station, a rover unit would not be that expensive for individual horse owners to purchase.
But in the article, they mentioned that their GPS units were only accurate to a few meters. Yes, your mentioned technology would certainly be best, but, unless I read the article incorrectly (egads! I RTFA), they are not using very reliable units.
Perhaps they should look into using units similar to your own. I am familiar with differential GPS and have used it, not finding it accurate enough for our liking, but I have never tried the surveyor grade ones, nor am I familiar with them. The units that we use on our robot are not the cheap handheld ones. A company was generous enough to donate a somewhat decent one to us, although the accuracy is not as good as the top-of-the-line ones, unfortunately.
The problem with setting up a base station at the track is it makes the units less portable and less convenient. For that the work, each track in the world would have to do the same, and the likeliness of the happening is almost nothing. The current GPS setup they have can be used at any track in the world, be it Churchill Downs, a track in New Zealand (their turf horses come over here to race all of the time!), or Belmont Park. They could use it at their training stables as well.
Having an accurate account could certainly help when, after a big race, the race has to be reviewed because a jockey calls foul of a horse bumping out of the gate, or pinning against the pole. In a crowded field where cameras have limited vision, this information could be very helpful. But I still stand by the fact that, requiring each racetrack to maintain a base station is a little too hopeful a goal. There are hundreds of tracks, and having a technology that can be used anywhere at any time would be much more useful.
Interesting idea, though.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
The real worry here is that they'll start tracking how fast I ride my rental horse, and charge me extra for going too fast.