Spektacom Power Bat

The cricket world always amazed us with their day-to-day revolutions, often embedding advanced technologies and hence changing the whole view of the game. This time, Indian cricket legend Anil Kumble's start-up company Spektacom has shaken hands with the tech giant Microsoft to gift a new technology to all cricket players and fanatics. Being the brainchild of the former Indian batsman Anil Kumble who has also been trained as an engineer; proposed the concept of 'Power Bat' to Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) in 2017 and it took less than a year to convert the concept into reality. The idea is to record the data of shots and batting techniques, and analyse it using Microsoft’s Azure Sphere by broadcasters as well as players to uplift the stature of playing and displaying the game at big stages. The company has tried out the 'Power Bat' during the Tamil Nadu Premier League, and it took only a few seconds to analyse and represent the data on the screen. The chip does not affect the weight of the bat and hence unobtrusive to use. With this technology, players are expecting a significant change in their game as they can now profoundly understand the playing strategies of their opponents.

How does it work?

• The 'Power Bat' has been devised to improve the game for players, analysts and spectators. A lightweight Azure Sphere-powered sticker which looks like a thin credit card and weighs approximately five grams; is attached to the back side of the bat at its shoulder and in this way, an ordinary bat can be turned into a power bat. Using this technology, the power of any shot can be calculated in a new unit called 'Power Specs' where the number of Specs is directly proportional to the power of shots.
• As soon as the bat hits the ball; the chip starts capturing and processing four types of parameters- quality of the shot measured in percentages (i.e., closeness to the sweet spot), speed of the bat in kmph, the angle twist of the bat at the time of impact measured in degrees and the power of the shot.
• Post that, the data is relayed from the sticker to the stump box from where it is transmitted to broadcast center. There, the data can be displayed on a big screen in real-time using advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). In this way, the batting strategies and techniques can be made readable for others enhancing the zest of the game.