What is the Adidas Smart Ball?
The SMART BALL is a Bluetooth Smart and app-enabled soccer ball with integrated sensor technology for dead-ball kicking and training such as penalties, free-kicks, shooting, corners, long passes and goal kicks. In short the Adidas’ new Bluetooth soccer ball analyzes your kicks to help improve your game and touch on the ball.
Creating a ball that meets sporting regulations wasn’t easy, but engineers at Adidas took up the challenge and “had to develop our own proprietary wireless induction charging solution to eliminate the need for any kind of external charging socket on the ball,” said Ian Munson, senior electromechanical engineer with the Adidas Innovation Team that created the Smart Ball. “This is used to charge a 160mAhr lithium-ion polymer battery embedded within the ball that powers all of the on-board MEMS, data logging, and Bluetooth Smart wireless electronics.” This allows the player to kick the ball up to 2,000 times per week before it needs a recharge. This is what seperates the Adidas Smart ball from the competition.
What are the Benefits of the Adidas Smart Ball?
The benefits are astronomical for several reasons. Not only can a soccer player, coach, or parent analyze the tons of data collected by the technology, but it can also be used as a tool for motivation. Kids learn quicker through immediate gratification. And that is exactly what this ball offers. Kids will pick up their ball take it and get thousands of touches on it, then go and “analyze” the data. For a parent or coach, this is a dream come true. No longer do you have to encourage the youth player to get out and practice because they will be motivated themselves to get the data. Their friends will also want to play and collect data. The Adidas Smart Ball adds another element of training and another reason to get out and play.
Conclusion
The Adidas Smart Ball does two things that are huge benefits for your young soccer players. The fun technology associated with the ball encourages kids to play more often. The technology then allows the players and coaches to analyze the data and improve their abilities. So in essence you are doing two things at once. This is why this Adidas Smart ball is worth the money because you can’t replicate the data collection with any other ball or technology.