Safaricom’s Technology to Help Athletes Break Two-Hour Marathon Mark

Safaricom and Vodafone Group are working together to deliver an Internet of Things (IoT) technology that will enable Kenyan athletes to break the two-hour marathon mark.

Currently, the marathon World Record is 2:02:57 and was set by the Kenyan athlete Dennis Kimetto on September 28, 2014, at the Berlin Marathon. Together with a group of scientists, Safaricom and Vodafone, world’s best marathon runners, and other industry partners are working on a project dubbed SUB2 that will help break that record.

The innovation aims at leaving a legacy in athletics by demonstrating how science and technology can fairly help athletes improve their performance. SUB2 is led by Yannis Pitsiladis, a Professor of Sport and Exercise Science at the University of Brighton and a member of the International Olympic Committee’s Medical and Scientific Commission.

According to Thibaud Rerolle, Director – Technology, Safaricom, the company continues to seek and explore new innovations around the latest technologies, with the goal of creating new opportunities for Kenyans.

“This application of IoT in athlete training in Iten and Eldoret will not only help Kenyan athletes improve their performance, it will also further refine and fine tune our IoT solution in readiness for nationwide deployment,” he added.

IoT technologies bring Internet-connected network intelligence to a wide range of devices at work, both at home and on the move.

Vodafone has already built a SUB2 smartwatch app that provides telemetry with enhanced location tracking using mobile networks. Ethiopia’s own elite athlete, Kenenisa Bekele, used the app as his digital pacemaker in the 2017 Berlin marathon.

Working with partners, Vodafone engineers have now also enabled a series of body sensors to communicate with the SUB2 app over a mobile network. The watch provides contact time, cadence and strikes angle, 3D visualization, skin and land surface temperature.

This innovative technology was first showcased at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain earlier this month. It is currently in use at the Iten and Eldoret training grounds in Kenya.

It has been deployed on a two kilometer stretch within the hilly Iten area, and a 16 kilometer stretch on the flat South Moiben route in Eldoret. The sensors give coaches live access to real-time data as athletes train, helping them understand the root causes of injuries or performance degradation, and how these can be avoided.

More than 100,000 attendees at Mobile World Congress had the opportunity to experience a demonstration of the technology relayed live over Safaricom’s 4G+ network from Iten and Eldoret.