Ciara Finnegan

Title:  How Full is Your Tank…Development of a ‘Readiness-to-Perform’ Tool for Monitoring & Predicting Sporting Performance

Supervision Team: Anna Donnla O’Hagan, DCU / Jane Walsh, NUIG / Sarah Meegan, DCU

Description: The sports industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry in which coaches and sport and medicine teams strive to push and progress an athlete’s performance year on year. Coaches and scientists structure training programmes with distinct periods of progressive overload coupled with recovery in an attempt to maximise or sustain performance during specific periods of competition. The objective of this research is to test the most relevant existing, portable technologies to monitor athletes’ physical, cognitive, and psychological readiness for sporting performance and to develop a protocol combining bio-sensory and performance-based data acquisition (e.g., a mobile version of Psychomotor Vigilance Task, CANTAB, wearable HRV/blood pressure devices, mobile EEG ECG etc.) related to performance readiness to aid athletes and coaching personnel on an athlete’s individualised readiness for sporting performance. The project will ultimately deliver a proposal for a user-friendly tool for monitoring performance ready to assist with continuous improvement in sporting performance and training practices.