by As the runners in the London Marathon collected their numbers this week, their hearts were – no doubt – beating a little faster than usual, ahead of their big test. There was one notable heart among them: Des Linden, Olympian, world record holder and winner of the Boston Marathon.
But Linden is not running the race. Instead, it was a hologram of her heart thudding away, based on a full digital recreation of her heart, based on MRI scans and other technology. It is a virtual replica of the real thing – what experts call a “digital twin”.
Hopefully, in the future, those digital twins will allow their physical counterparts to perform better than ever before. TCS created this example to celebrate the marathon – but futurists believe that these virtual copies could be made all the way up to Earth scale, allowing them to understand the effect of large interventions without the cost than the risk.
It is one of the many technologies that are changing the marathon beyond recognition. From new super shoes to the increased use of artificial intelligence, endurance running – perhaps the simplest sport in the world – is quickly becoming a well-known technology playground that is changing the sport.
That future might not look so different right away, though; if we were transported to watch the marathon in ten or even 50 years, it is likely that people will still be running on a road in the same way as they have been for thousands of years. People still need to run 26.2 miles, even if they’ve been scanned down to the artery and their digital twin has run it before to make sure their strategies are optimized.
But those runners may have received a suggestion ahead of time that their virtual heart shows that if they spend three hours at a particular heart rate, for example, their performance will drop. Or it might even mean having an AI coach in your ear that knows you better than you know yourself, Bill Quinn from TCS speculates the future – one that sees exactly when you’re flagging and gives not just the inspiration you need, but the exact one. the form of words to give you that inspiration.
Currently, however, our monitoring technology is much better at knowing about you than delivering actionable information. The data often provide “data, but not necessarily information”, says Quinn. But there are technologies that will do this much better, he hopes: artificial intelligence, for example, could take those different pieces of data and paste them into something useful.
That will depend on having the detailed data in the first place – and much of this sensing technology is already on the way. Even casual runners wear smartwatches that monitor them while they work out and sleep, pulling together vast amounts of data to make recommendations. Amateurs are now offering continuous glucose monitors such as Abbott’s Lingo, which measure glucose levels during rest and exercise in order to make nutritional recommendations.
Much of that data lives within its own apps, making it harder to find useful recommendations; Quinn notes that having a “digital twin” is more than just a question. It’s also highly personal by nature, and customers are increasingly concerned about it. “You have to be really thoughtful about how this data is going to be used, who it’s going to be shared with, and how that information is going to be used,” notes Quinn – “because there’s certainly a chance that the details that there. used in somewhat sinister ways”.
A few days before the marathon, the International Olympic Committee launched its new AI agenda. Although IOC President Thomas Bach noted that athletes are in the unusual position of knowing that AI cannot take over their jobs, he said that artificial intelligence would come to all parts of sport.
It will be useful to find talent, for example, and machine learning will be able to find patterns that would suggest that a child is very good at a particular sport, for example. And it will be useful for viewers, too, as TV stations work on AI-powered systems that would be able to summarize events for viewers to find, and automatically edit a quick video of highlights for them.
The danger, of course, is that all this technology leaves existing sports inequalities: just as richer countries can afford more coaches, they can afford more computers. But Christoph Schell – Intel’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer, who will be part of the upcoming Olympics – argued that it could also help reduce it.
He mentioned a project run by Intel in Senegal, which used AI to identify young people who showed particular promise in certain sports. At the moment, they would have “no ability to access the cloud, to analyze your data”. “Now, if you have access to a mobile phone, you can participate,” he said.
A few days later and a few miles away, almost 50,000 people will be queuing to start the marathon. Some people could do that without any details at all; others will know exactly how much glucose is in their blood and how fast their heart is beating. Some will have their hearts scanned to see exactly how those heartbeats work, and their feet scanned to see exactly how their feet should fit in their £250 shoes. But they will all have to run just as far.
