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The ARCANE Project: How an Ecological Dynamics Framework Can Enhance Performance Assessment and Prediction in Football

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Abstract

This paper discusses how an ecological dynamics framework can be implemented to interpret data, design practice tasks and interpret athletic performance in collective sports, exemplified here by research ideas within the Augmented peRCeption ANalysis framEwork for Football (ARCANE) project promoting an augmented perception of football teams for scientists and practitioners. An ecological dynamics rationale can provide an interpretation of athletes’ positional and physiological data during performance, using new methods to assess athletes’ behaviours in real-time and, to some extent, predict health and performance outcomes. The proposed approach signals practical applications for coaches, sports analysts, exercise physiologists and practitioners through merging a large volume of data into a smaller set of variables, resulting in a deeper analysis than typical measures of performance outcomes of competitive games.

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Notes

  1. Geometric or statistical multilateration techniques are commonly used to combine multiple wireless measurements to obtain position estimates of mobile devices in the vicinity of three or more stationary base stations.

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Correspondence to Micael S. Couceiro.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the grant SFRH/BPD/99655/2014, Ingeniarius, Ltd., CIPER, Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Universidade de Lisboa, Laboratory of Expertise in Sport (SpertLab), and Centre for Sports Engineering Research (CSER).

Conflict of interest

Micael Couceiro is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Ingeniarius, Ltd., a company that provides custom outsource consulting and research services for technology-based companies and industrial units in the several fields of engineering, including robotics, image processing, computer science and sports engineering. Gonçalo Dias, Duarte Araújo and Keith Davids declare that they have no conflicts of interest relevant to the content of this article.

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Couceiro, M.S., Dias, G., Araújo, D. et al. The ARCANE Project: How an Ecological Dynamics Framework Can Enhance Performance Assessment and Prediction in Football. Sports Med 46, 1781–1786 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0549-2

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