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IIT Madras Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Sport Sciences and Analytics is developing indigenous sports technologies. The key objective is to enable Indian athletes win medals in international fora, especially the Olympics. This Centre was established in 2019 with funding from the ‘Institute of Eminence’ (IoE) initiative of the Government.
Ramesh Kumar, former ESPN Vice President and Head of ESPN (India and South Asia) and Global Head of ESPNcricinfo, took over recently as the CEO of the Centre. In this interview he says that foreign countries are reluctant to share technology freely, which leaves Indian athletes at a disadvantage as they have to travel abroad to get training using advanced sports tech. This is a great drain on the exchequer and does not benefit a broad base of athletes.
Ramesh Kumar, CEO, CESSA
This IIT Madras CoE targets creating a sustainable and scalable model for India by developing indigenous technology to train athletes. It also aims to kick-start a thriving start-up ecosystem in sports tech. The collaborators for this project include foreign universities like the North-Western University and Kansas State University in the US besides IIT Gandhinagar in India. Excerpts from an interview:
What is the agenda of CESSA? How will it benefit from being housed in IIT-M? Who will this programme target?
It will be a global platform for fostering innovation in sports technology and deliver products and solutions to enhance athlete performance and also serve general fitness and health consumers. We will deliver high quality sports science and education courses and sports coaching products targeted at students and coaches through various strategic collaborations with IITM credibility, expertise, content and certification. The centre will set up an incubator ecosystem for sport tech start-ups which will be supported by inter-disciplinary faculty accomplished in the field of modelling, data science, IoT and AI and wearables and biomechanics. It will leverage the domain expertise and work and research being carried out in IITM.
Can you give an illustrative example of the work CESSA will be doing? rather than at an abstract level?
An example in application development is development of ‘smart boxer’ analytics platform that intelligently fuses computer vision algorithms and wearables data to provide holistic performance analysis of boxers with respect to skill and strength conditioning to enable coaches and the boxer to plan strategy for games in future and get an edge in the game
What is the latest in sports technologies, equipment and analytics that you will be using at the Centre?
The work in the domains of AI, ML, data science, computer vision, IoT and sensors will be leveraged to come up with applications, tools and platforms .
Will you be working in certain sporting disciplines only or athletes of all sports can benefit from the work you will be doing?
There will be higher emphasis on the following sports in the beginning – hockey, archery, badminton, boxing, wrestling and kabaddi in terms of tools and applications. Also for cricket, unique data analytics and insights tools have been developed by IITM for ESPNcricinfo. Also, IIT M CESSA is working on enhancing fan experience in stadiums, which can be used across sports to enhance live experience
How can non-athletes but fitness conscious people benefit from the work that you will be doing?
For fitness-conscious people CESSA will focus on developing tools and applications for gait and force analysis using in-sole, sensor-based to help them make lifestyle-based corrections.
The centre will also focus on indigenisation of some sporting product and services besides enhancement of sports coverage on media with various tools and innovation. In addition, we will disseminate quality sports science and sports management courses to students and build an ecosystem for development of overall sports technology start-ups offering employment to the youth in the country.
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