Activ-IoTy, an IoT Platform for Sports Tourism Internet of Things to Promote Sports Tourism

Martin Alvarez-Espinar of CTIC Technology Centre

martin.alvarez@ctic.es Calle Ada Byron, 39 33203, Gijón, Spain

NEW TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS TO MEASURE THE OBJECTIVES OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM

Abstract: The combination of technology and sports brings

innovation to cities that may use Internet-enabled platforms to offer better services, monitor the impact of real sports activities and attracting active visitors that will become multipliers of the promotion of tourism. Activ-IoTy is an open sports timekeeping system that offers unlimited possibilities to engage citizens and visitors in the practice of sports through gamification, and helping the local government to define policies and actuations for the city, based on facts. Activ-IoTy is based on open standards and low-cost easy-to-deploy IoT (Internet of Things) technologies.

Keywords: iot; sports; timekeeping; gamification; tourism

I. INTRODUCTION

Sports tourism is a fast-growing area of the

global travel industry. Analysts forecast this specific

tourism market to grow at an annual grown rate of

41.45% during the period 2017-2021 (Technavio,

2017). Sports tourism refers to a traveler's

involvement with a country or region's sporting

events. Active Sports Tourism is a subtype that

refers to travelers who take part in sports events in

the destination (Gibson, Heather J. 1998).

Athletics is perhaps the most popular sport in the

world. It’s the most followed discipline during the

Summer Olympic Games. Just as an example, in

London 2012, the 100-meter dash event brought in

20 million viewers in the UK, 10.5 million in the US

and 6.2 million in Canada (Cohen, D., 2016)

(O'Connell, M., 2012) (Vlessing E., 2012). Also,

Jogging is extended in all countries as a base sport

for kids or adult people.

Fun and amateur races are also becoming

popular, even among those who do not practice

sports regularly. This trend is directly aligned with

public policies of governments in smart and

sustainable cities and regions, affecting positively to

health and wellness of citizens.

It is estimated that more than 30 thousand

running events take place in the U.S. every year, and

there are over 47 million of runners in that country

(Statista, 2017).

In EU28, figures are even more impressive.

Jogging is part of the way of life for many

Europeans. For instance, the 31% of the Danish

population are runners, 25% in Germany (Scheerder,

J., Breedveld, K., & Borgers, J., 2015). Most of

these runners take part in competitions.

Gamification —adding game playing elements—

into sports makes more attractive the practice,

engaging more people, and using players as

promotion multipliers. In order to implement

gamification in running/jogging two important

aspects must be considered: accurate/official

timekeeping, and publication of comparable results

for statistics and competition. This can be achieved

through complex and reliable competition

management systems, but it implies high costs.

This paper presents Activ-IoTy, an innovative

low-cost platform to promote healthy and

competitive sports, in concrete Athletics and

Cycling, and how this may affect the evolution of

tourism strategies. This platform is based on the IoT

(Internet of Things) paradigm, where distributed

electronic devices (i.e., computers, sensors,

actuators, etc.) are connected to the Internet and

interoperate with them. It provides a complete

timekeeping and data management system for

athletes and cyclists at public sports facilities such

as jogging and cycling trail paths.

II. OBJECTIVES

The Activ-IoTy platform aims at enabling a

complete system to control and measure the activity

level of citizens and visitors in a city or region,

offering challenging personal incentives to increase

the number of runners, and increasing their

participation in sports. Once this platform is

deployed and running, potential tourist will be

attracted by the different activities and challenges.

So, the main objectives of this platform and its

deployment in a public space are:

• Motivate citizens and visitors to practice sports

through continuous running/cycling public and

private competitive challenges open to anyone.

• Promote local sports activities through innovative

channels such as sports mobile applications and

specific sports social networks such as Strava1.

• Engage citizens and visitors in healthy activities

such as cycling and running/jogging through

competitive events.

• Analyze the evolution of sports habits of visitors

and population.

• Increase number of visitors attracted by the local

sports activities.

• Scale and increase the interest in the initiative

through the network effect of those who already

took part in the initiative.

• Spread the initiative giving users official

certificates after the completion of challenges.

• Increase security when practicing sports.

III. METHODOLOGY

Activ-IoTy was developed in early 2018 and

presented to the Open IoT Challenge, a contest

organized by the Eclipse Foundation, with the

objective to create innovative IoT-based projects.

Indeed, this platform was awarded the first price,

competing with other 77 projects (Eclipse

Foundation, 2018).

1 https://www.strava.com

This system was initially designed following the

concept of rapid prototyping, creating a modular

low-cost solution to guarantee simplification and

reliability in timekeeping and competition

management. It is based on cutting-edge standard

technologies such as MQTT (MQTT.org, 2017),

JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data, 2017) and

OpenTrack Vocabulary (Alvarez-Espinar, M.,

2017), supporting plug-and-play devices, with full

interoperability with external servers through an

open data module that enables the publication of

data.

Diagram in Fig. 1 shows the full stack of

technologies used by Activ-IoTy.

Fig. 1. Stack of technologies used in Activ-IoTy

As shown in Fig. 2 the design of the platform is

based on the pub-sub (publication-subscription)

paradigm. This means that some components

(publishers or senders) send messages to a central

point, called broker, that delivers the messages to

other components (subscribers or receivers)

interested in receiving the information sent by the

publishers. In concrete, those publishers are the

Checkpoints placed along a jogging/cycling course

that registers the exact time of users at that place. A

subscriber acts as Controller and collect all the

information sent by Checkpoints and process the

information.

Fig. 2. Pub-sub components of Activ-IoTy

The system allows that third-party subscribers

(e.g., external companies, developers, statistics

departments, etc.) may perform other activities, such

as visualizations and integration with other services.

The platform is installed in existing popular

running and cycling courses. The investment is

adjusted to the number of required checkpoints

along the route.

Users must wear a low-cost wristband or piece of

clothes that includes an RFID (Radio-frequency

identification) tag that identifies univocally every

user. This RFID identifier is the information the

system register at checkpoints. The registration

process and the distribution of RFID identifiers are

performed by the local tourist office.

IV. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

The platform is fully functional, and it was tested

in real environments with runners. There are infinite

applications to be built on top of the data generated

and collected by Activ-IoTy: analysis of citizen and

visitors’ behavior for policy-making based on facts;

promotion of healthy habits; and fostering active

tourism. Activ-IoTy is a standards-based platform

that collects and processes data that can be re-used

by public bodies (e.g., urban planners and tourism

departments), private companies (e.g., lodging

businesses, active tourism businesses, etc.) and

academia (e.g., socio-economic researchers).

As seen in Fig. 3 the data collected by platform

can be processed and represented on a map.

Additional features of the platform enable a

subsequent publication of information as open data.

Fig. 3. Checkpoints collecting data and visualizing it on a map

So, Activ-IoTy is a low-cost tool that enables

tourism stakeholders to exploit the momentum of

running in cities and rural areas, maximizing the

opportunities in other sectors.

REFERENCES

Alvarez-Espinar, M., (2017), OpenTrack Data Model. [Online] Available: https://w3c.github.io/opentrack-cg/spec/model/ (April 26, 2018) Cohen, D., (2016). [Online] Available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/olympic-viewing-figs.html (April 26, 2018) Eclipse Foundation, (2018), Winners of Open IoT Challenge 4.0 Demonstrate How Open Source Accelerates Innovation. [Online] Available: https://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20180404_iotchallenge_winners2018.php (April 26, 2018) Gibson, Heather J. (1998). Active Sport Tourism: Who Participates? Leisure Studies. 17: 155–170. JSON for Linking Data, (2017), [Online] Available: https://json-ld.org (April 26, 2018) MQTT.org, (2017) [Online] Available: (April 26, 2018) O'Connell, M., (2012), [Online] Available: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/olympics-2012-ratings-usain-bolt-mckayla-maroney-358575 (April 26, 2018) Scheerder, J., Breedveld, K., & Borgers, J., (2015), Running across Europe The Rise and Size of one of the Largest Sport Markets, Palgrave Macmillan Statista. (2017), [Online] Available: https://www.statista.com/topics/1743/running-and-jogging/ (April 26, 2018) Technavio (2017). Global Sports Tourism Market 2017-2021, Technavio 163, 51-59. Vlessing E., (2012), [Online] Available: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/olympics-2012-usain-bolts-gold-358997 (April 26, 2018)