Celebrating 40 years of globally leading technology An eye on human progress
What really makes a top athlete? 3D body scans reveal the secrets behind top performance and set new standards in sports diagnostics and athlete development.
Just what makes a top athlete? How do they get to the pinnacle and how do they stay there? What everyone in the team of such competitive athletes knows is that it is not the day of the competition that decides everything, even if that is what people like to say. Rather, it's what happens beforehand – getting the competitor to peak form. This requires precise monitoring and assessment methods of his physical changes. On the one hand, to identify improvements and optimization potential and, on the other hand, to recognize injury risks at an early stage and thus support the athlete's health in the best possible way.
This is where the elite athlete among body scanners can help.
We are launching a 3D body scanner that takes performance diagnostics and athlete development to a new level.”
Four features of the technology are particularly important in this regard. It is intuitive and easy to use so that as many athletes, sports teams, sporting bodies and biomechanics labs as possible can benefit from it. It delivers results quickly – a scan takes less than a second and the results are available immediately. This makes it more convenient for the athletes and enables mass scanning, for example of entire football teams. Thirdly, it allows many relevant measurements to assess the body statics and symmetry of athletes and patients – including distances, circumferences, volumes and angles. And finally, the results are absolutely reliable.
This means reproducible, with as few blind spots as possible and precise.
But these diagnostic capabilities and access to precise biomechanical data also have great value beyond professional sport. They support therapies and documentation in rehabilitation facilities and are used as a basis in sports medicine research.
Almost 30 years of leading the world of 3D body scanning
As was pointed out at the beginning with the athlete, not only the result is worth a look, but also the way leading up to it.
VITRONIC's journey as a pioneer and innovator in the field of image processing began 40 years ago. Staying at the cutting edge over such a long period of time requires two very specific skills, among others: Openness to new impulses and the willingness to be guided by the visions that arise from them. The entry into the world of body scanning illustrates this perfectly. The source of our body scanners couldn't be more unusual. Art and science are often at odds, but when they share a vision, they can inspire each other.
In our case, it was a sculptor who wanted our scanning technology, which had previously been used in industry for applications such as the 3 dimensional measurement of aluminium ingots, to measure a person and use the data to create a sculpture.”
The creative spark caught on and led to the development of the first VITUS body scanner in 1995. Since then, hundreds of VITUS body scan solutions have been successfully applied in various industries such as medicine, performance diagnostics, research, ergonomics and 3D figure printing to suit different applications. Vitronic also focused on the special requirements for assessing athletes in top-class sport at an early stage, which led to numerous associations, training centers and medical departments using the VITUS body scanner for prevention, body tracking and rehabilitation.
The scanner uses laser triangulation as the basis for the measurements and through this methodology translate surfaces of physical objects into 3D dimensional data.
The credibility of this data is demonstrated by the fact that it has been used as ground truth in many scientific studies and applied for years by renowned institutions such as the Institute of Biomechanics and Orthopaedics at the German Sport University Cologne.
These many years of experience and the user feedback gained in the process, combined with an innovative technological approach and creative design, are now making the next step in the monitoring and assessment of athletes possible.
Focus on Improvement
Despite 40 years of experience in machine vision systems and almost 30 years of expertise in body scanners, our enthusiasm for exploring new technological possibilities is unbroken."
The new body scanner is proof of this and will certainly not be the last. It has been designed to deliver high data density and minimize hidden surfaces during data acquisition, so that everything from performance optimization for athletes to therapy support for patients can be driven by a sound basis. In order to remain true to this innovative spirit, the company not only builds on its experience and willingness to think outside the box, but also benefits from its global network and cross-industry exchange.
