Microsoft Bats for IoT Use in Cricket
This is why Kumble and his startup Spektacom developed the “Power Bat”-a credit card sized sticker that is engineered to measure the quality of a batter’s swing. Now, Spektacom has brought Microsoft on board to use its IoT platform Microsoft Azure for real-time analysis on the data collected by the batting sensors. The result of the partnership is an IoT ecosystem that can deliver sports analytics directly to spectators as the match is happening.
By measuring just a few parameters, the goal of the Power Bat is to determine how close each swing has come to the “sweet spot”-a type of bat swing in cricket that achieves optimal acceleration. Between the Spektacom sensor and Microsoft AI software, there are three key players that deliver this assessment: the Power Bat sticker, the stump box that acts as an IoT gateway, and the AI analytics in the cloud.