This spring, Major League Baseball (MLB)’s rules committee gave players the greenlight to use two types of wearable technology during games. One is a sensor-filled sleeve made by a company called Motus that tracks stresses on a pitcher’s elbow, so coaches and trainers can help him to reduce the likelihood of a career-ending injury. The other is a heart and breathing monitor made by Zephyr Bioharness. (Given the recent Labor Day holiday in the United States, it’s worth noting that the MLB’s Players Association has been expressing concern that the use of wearables to track athletes on, and maybe someday off, the field could start to cut into players’ privacy—and paychecks.)
Baseball has always been steeped in data, of course. When I was child attending Cubs games in Chicago, one of my friends religiously kept score in her gamebook. In fact, just the other day I noticed that another friend’s dad still does this, and when I remarked about how manual scorekeeping now has a nostalgic air, he reminded me that when he first starting going to games, it was the only way to keep tabs favorite teams or players. “Now, there’s Jumbotrons and electronics everywhere showing you all the stats,” he said, noting that he still likes the feel of pencil on paper.
When it comes to actually powering all those Jumbotrons and ensuring that a park’s water infrastructure can handle thousands of toilets flushing at once during the seventh-inning stretch, stadium operations managers also want data—a lot of highly accurate, actionable data.
Stadiums are like little cities and, therefore, are great testbeds for evaluating IoT systems that can augment building-management systems, in order to give stadium owners precise insights into energy and water usage. And because stadiums experience such extremes—from very little load on the local energy grid to massive spikes in consumption within the course of just a few hours—I believe they’re especially appealing as environments to test how and whether IoT systems (sensor networks, gateways and data-analytics platforms) can help operations teams make a closed—but grid-connected—system more resilient and responsive to fluctuating demand.
In Ireland, Dublin’s Croke Park stadium has become a smart city testbed. In addition to tracking noise levels and water use, it uses motion sensors to understand the movements of people—information that Croke Park can use for a range of applications, including wayfinding and security staffing. Now, the MLB is looking to leverage IoT technology to help improve energy and water usage at all 30 of the league’s stadiums throughout North America. To kick off the effort, it started, unsurprisingly, with a focus on data collection. MLB partnered with OSIsoft, a provider of real-time data-analysis software. (While OSIsoft built its business by providing data-historian software, which logs machine data for later analysis, it now also provides real-time data collection and storage services for a number of industries, including energy producers and utility providers.)
In Seattle, OSIsoft worked with the Mariners’ stadium and other vendors to establish a sensor network to reduce water use. This might seem like an odd objective in the Pacific Northwest, but the treatment and transport of water has a very large carbon footprint. The companies managed to cut 2 million gallons and decrease water costs by 10 percent during the span of three years.
Now, OSIsoft has partnered with Qualcomm in its hometown of San Diego to outfit the Padres’ Petco Park with a network of sensors from which data is routed via a gateway (manufactured by an as-yet-unnamed OEM) that uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. OSIsoft can provide the park with an overview of how much water, power and natural gas are being used across the ballpark at any given time, and the expectation is that the stadium will use this new visibility to consume resources more efficiently and lower its operational expenses by more than 25 percent by 2021.
Martin Otterson, OSIsoft’s senior VP of sales, marketing and industry, told me that the long-term vision is that the park could work very closely with San Diego’s utility providers to move toward a business model by which the stadium and even its tenants (vendors, concessionaires and so forth) could pay for energy and water based on how much they use and when they use it. To accomplish this goal, the stadium would install submeters capable of tracking the energy or water consumed by each machine or piece of equipment. This would mean that instead of paying flat rates for utilities, the stadium and tenants would pay only for the water, gas and electricity that they actually consumed. In some cases, this may mean a decrease in utility costs; in others, it might trigger an increase—but also a strong incentive to make efficiency improvements.
Eventually, the stadium could begin generating some of its own energy, via solar panels, wind turbines or even harvesting the footfalls of thousands of fans walking through the stadium, to concession stands, to restrooms, back to their seats, back for more beer, etc. It could then sell any excess energy back to the local utility.
Smarter stadiums enable benefits for fans, too, beyond the shared benefits resulting from a more sustainably run facility. A smartphone app can pull data from motion or other sensors within the stadium to help fans determine which beer stand, restroom or souvenir shop has the shortest line. And if the app also taps into the phone’s Bluetooth or Wi-Fi radio, it could provide fans with step-by-step directions to that shortest line. In fact, my friend’s dad was just complaining that he slogged through the Oakland Coliseum the other night, searching for popcorn during a standoff between the A’s and the Boston Red Sox, but never found a vendor selling the snack. He would have loved an app that could direct him not only to the popcorn, but also the shortest line to buy it. After all, this was his last chance to see David Ortiz before the player retires, and he wanted to get all the stats he could.
Mary Catherine O’Connor is the editor of IoT Journal and a former staff reporter for RFID Journal. She also writes about technology, as it relates to business and the environment, for a range of consumer magazines and newspapers.