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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."
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.
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.
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