“Tracking Systems” at the service of Sports research – Inverso Magazine
Bruno Gonçalves, professor at the Department of Sport and Health of ESDH-UÉ and CHRC researcher, had his story as a researcher published in INVERSO magazine, where he explains his passion for sports and the desire to understand everything that goes on around it. This culminated in high-impact and innovative scientific studies within the sports area.
Bruno spoke about the beginning of his career in research that led him to high impact studies on behavior analysis and sports performance analysis.
"I trained to be a Physical Education teacher, but in the first year, after finishing the Master's in Teaching, I obtained a research grant in a scientific project whose objective was to evaluate training and competition in collective sports games. The project turned out to be an awakening to the establishment of my professional goals. I fell in love with scientific research, with the analysis and control of training and the game, and, essentially, with object tracking technologies, known as tracking systems.”
For Bruno, technology is a great ally for these scientific studies, thus managing to analyze the behavior and sports performance through quick access to information and taking into account that new multidisciplinary approaches are constantly needed. “These systems shaped the way I look at the behavior of athletes in a sporting context and were (and are) undoubtedly the technological revolution in performance monitoring and evaluation processes”.
These technological tools have proven to be useful even for new scientific studies that have never been done before, such as the study of exposure to interpersonal contact in football during the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with Hugo Folgado, also a researcher at the CHRC and professor at the Department of Sport and Health at ESDH-UÉ, this study was carried out using automatic tracking systems. The analysis suggested that football is not a sport with a high risk of respiratory exposure for the transmission of COVID-19, which corroborates the classification advanced by DGS. This way, studies carried out using tracking systems tools are not only at the service of football, but also have an impact on the community in general.
Read the published interview here (page 26): https://www.uevora.pt/ue-media/Revista-Inverso/Inverso5