Less than half a decade ago, all four indoor professional sports under the care of FC Barcelona’s umbrella were using different athlete monitoring and tracking systems. Football giant in Spanish top division is the flagship of the club. It used STATSports’ GPS wearables, which were whole other product powered by a completely different technology.
Barca Innovation Hub, the research and development department of the club, has invested a lot to standardize a variety of monitoring and tracking systems in their durability, dependability, precision and functionality. Wimu was that top-quality wearable which served all purposes for Barcelona. Hybrid technology for both indoor and outdoor activities, Wimu was developed by engineers previously working for popular players like Nokia. It is based in the city of Andalucia, Spain. RealTrack Systems was a startup that lead to the development of Wimu. Head of Knowledge at Barcelona’s Innovation Hub, Albert Mundet praised RealTrack systems by saying
“RTS had a lot of potential with what they were delivering and what, at the same time, they were willing to improve.”
Wimu started it’s collaboration with Barcelona from its futsal team but in no time it integrated itself in to each of the five sports teams under the club. Wimu technology can be calibrated with both GNSS and GPS satellites outdoors without losing any abilities to communicate with the antennas inside thanks to its ultra-wideband frequencies.
“Every week, our 25 physical trainers in an internal workshop would [be] discussing in between them about new metrics, about the reliability and usability of the metrics they were already doing and considering if there was something that should be improved,” Albert Mundet added. “The expertise of Real Track has been yet on engineering, and then [we are] building on top of that a KPI report based on Barca’s knowhow.”
Barcelona prefers Wimu over both STATSports and Catapult because of the continued partnership with RTS and its high end data analysis and tactical applications.