Aust company tracks athletes

Canberra company GPSports is tackling overseas markets, with a system that uses GPS to help athletes in their training.

So far GPSports has managed to sell its SPI 10 product in seven countries, including the US and Korea.

GPSports managing director, Adrian Faccioni, said that the miniature tracking technology was patented, and linked GPS with heart rate. Facconi said that this helped athletes to modify training patterns and improve performance.

He said that the units sold to the Korean Sports Science Institute would be used to help the country's athletes train for the upcoming Athens Olympics.

When athletes wear the unit, it receives positional information from GPS satellites to record and store times. This can include how far the athletes have travelled, how fast, their altitude, direction and heart rate. This information can then be downloaded to a computer, in order to interpret the results.

'The base technology is not new - it is used to track cars such as taxis to pinpoint which route they're on and how long it takes,' Faccioni said. 'So we thought it was possible to develop a similar tracking technology to cars and we've had two very good technicians work on developing the SPI 10.'

'Unlike radio frequency devices on the market that need to be within controlled areas to work such as basketball stadiums, the SPI 10 signal can be picked up anywhere in the world.'