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MELBOURNE
BRUNSWICK
BUNDOORA
FISHERMANS BEND
POINT COOK
HAMILTON
HO CHI MINH CITY
HANOI
IT breakthrough could help AFL teams win
Sport clubs worldwide deal daily with player injuries that cost them money and lost
player time. But what if IT came to the rescue and helped teams to be more
competitive with an efficient way to capture player injury data?
Research by RMIT University PhD graduate, Brian Hanisch, shows that a new
spoken language application, ISEA, has improved the efficiency of player injury
data capture dramatically.
“Using speech rather than a keyboard to interact with computers has real appeal to
people, as it’s quick and easy to do. The problem has been that up until now
people have experienced very poor speech recognition accuracy, which has meant
this technology hasn’t been taken up extensively by business,” he said.
ISEA overcomes these limitations. It incorporates speech recognition and spoken
language understanding techniques and several patentable techniques to improve
speech recognition accuracy to more than 95 per cent, and in ideal conditions the
accuracy increases to more than 98 per cent.
“With this high level of accuracy, speech recognition technology can be employed
as the user interface for player injury data capture, rather than traditional, slower
keyboard data capture,” Dr Hanisch said.
The ISEA software was developed in association with an AFL club and was used
to record medical and treatment consultations with doctors and physios involving
injured players.
Previously, capturing player injury data via keyboard data entry at the club took 15
hours per week. Using ISEA, the time has been reduced to less than two hours per
week – a dramatic increase in productivity. AFL players are expensive. If a player
can’t play because of injury they can cost a club up to $20,000 a game.*
Dr Hanisch said: “Central to a sporting club’s financial success is establishing the
organisational capability to develop a competitive team through best practice.
Ultimately teams want to win and ISEA has the potential to give a team a real
competitive advantage.”
Along with more than 5,600 other graduates, Dr Brian Hanisch will celebrate his
achievements at RMIT’s spectacular Graduation Ceremony at Etihad Stadium on
the evening of Wednesday, 16 December.
*Article on how science keeps an AFL team ahead, Science Network website, 3 December 2009.
For interviews or comment: Dr Brian Hanisch, 0417 867 191.
For general media enquiries, RMIT University Communications, Deborah
Sippitts, (03) 9925 3116 or 0429 588 869.
15 December, 2009
NEWS 
