Charles J. Murray, Senior Technical Editor -- Design News, October 31, 2007

With the debut of the television show Sport Science, the intangibles of sports are suddenly falling. The force of a major league fastball, the impact of two colliding Sumo wrestlers and the catching technique of Jerry Rice have all left the realm of folklore and are now measurable in engineering terms.

"We said, Why not take the ultimate biomechanical technology and apply it to the ultimate human athletes?" says Mickey Stern, co-creator of the new program, which airs on the Fox Sports Network on Sunday nights. "We wanted to do this in a way thats as big and outstanding and outrageous as possible."

Indeed, Fox Sports Network new show is big and outstanding for engineers, as well as for sports enthusiasts. By analyzing sports phenomena that occur in a fraction of a second and which have therefore been previously unmeasured Sport Science has broken new ground. The shows engineers and scientists, for example, used wireless accelerometers to measure the impact of two colliding Sumo wrestlers and the take-off force of basketballs best straight-up jump. They used inertial measurement units (IMUs) to measure how fast a soccer players leg travels during a so-called "bicycle kick."

"Theres a definite advancement of technology and its enabling us to make measurements that we couldnt have made 10 years ago," says Cynthia Bir, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Wayne State University, who serves as the lead scientist on the show. "We can instrument these athletes and see whats going on and determine what forces they generate and how much they can endure."

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