BMW Developing New Motion Tracking Technology for Swimmers, Latest Effort in Partnership with Team USA@around the rings

After successfully deploying cutting-edge technology to help America’s long jumpers go farther, faster, BMW is now turning its attention to USA Swimming. This latest effort will provide quantitative analysis of swimmers’ starts and turns – critical to success in the sport – via a unique motion tracking system. This technology initiative is central to BMW’s comprehensive U.S. Olympic program which endeavors to advance the performance goals of Team USA while bringing communities across the country closer to the excitement of the Olympic Games.

In addition to these efforts in North America, BMW UK, in its role as official Automotive Partner, will be providing a fleet of approximately 4,000 vehicles including low emission diesel, hybrid and electric cars as well as motorcycles and bicycles to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), among other host-market activities.

“As a major contributor to the U.S. economy, BMW is proud of our nearly 40-year history of manufacturing and operations in the United States,” said Dan Creed, Vice President, Marketing, BMW of North America. “The Olympic Movement and BMW share a common focus on performance and sustained competitive excellence. Through this sponsorship we are able to connect with customers throughout the country and extend the Olympic partnership through unique customer programs that drive brand affinity and sales.”

Driving Athlete Performance

As the Official Mobility Partner of the United States Olympic Committee, BMW is combining sports science with insights from automotive engineering, such as research into camera based pedestrian detection and tracking, to help Team USA athletes improve their performance. The first U.S. Olympic technology project BMW announced as part of this program was a velocity measurement system developed in partnership with USA Track & Field which measures and provides real-time analysis of three key parameters in the execution of a long jump – horizontal approach velocity, vertical take-off velocity and take-off angle. The project with USA Swimming, currently in development, aims to produce a motion tracking system that automatically captures a swimmer’s stroke at starts and turns and completes a performance data analysis for coaches – an expected improvement over the current approach of manual stroke counting and video study. With this new technology, BMW intends to apply quantitative analysis techniques to evaluate how major and minor adjustments in form and technique affect overall performance.

“Developing a first-of-its-kind training technology for Olympic athletes is very exciting for BMW,” said Dirk Rossberg, Head of the BMW Group Technology Office USA. “We’re eager to build upon what we learned from USA Track & Field, and are focused on delivering performance data for USA Swimming to help improve starts and turns - those pivotal moments in a race where Olympic medals are lost and won.”