Picture the following scenario. A player collapses for no apparent reason during a provincial league football match. He is stretchered off to receive immediate treatment from a doctor. After some minutes of head scratching, the doctor asks the team coach if the player had any medical conditions he should know about.
Unfortunately, the coach isn't sure, as this is the player's first game and he was brought on at the last minute. However, the coach reaches for his mobile phone and dials a number. After a few minutes he is able to inform the doctor that the player is actually a diabetic. The doctor is then able to treat the player and call for an ambulance.
So what number did the coach dial? Well, if the brains behind a potential new application for WAP-enabled mobile phones are successful, he will have called up a secure database of personal information (including medical history) on players that is maintained and supplied by the local sports club.
This "blindingly obvious" application was designed as a college project by Aidan McHugh, a final year computer science student in NUI Maynooth. It started out as a straightforward Web database for McHugh's local GAA club in Leixlip, Co Kildare, but was then developed as a WAP version to enable players and officials to check fixtures, locations, team compositions and details of individual player fitness.
McHugh, who plays for the Kildare seniors and who has sustained numerous injuries on the pitch, wondered if injury history and information on treatments could be usefully included.
As the project neared completion, it was decided to refine it to deliver pitchside services to referees, club officials and medical attendants. At present, these services enable a referee to retrieve information on a player's match conduct and bookings, while medical personnel can call up the player's injury history, noted allergies to medication and limited medical treatment suggestions.
McHugh says he believes that the GAA and the Gaelic Players' Association would be very interested in his system, particularly as concerns about health and safety on the field are being taken more seriously.
"Injuries are a huge problem for both players and clubs. Prompt and appropriate information and treatment assistance at the pitch side could be of incalculable benefit," says John Harpur, McHugh's supervisor at NUI Maynooth. Two of Harpur's sons play with a hurling club.
HARPUR and McHugh quickly became convinced of the application's commercial potential. "We would like to bring this to fruition as a real application that could be taken up and used in sport," says Harpur. "We want it to be available in situations where people are vulnerable."
Situations where information technology and outdoor team sports go hand-in-hand are few and far between, particularly at the grassroots level. However, technology is increasingly being used to care for people, says Harpur. "You get the impression with a lot of mobile commerce systems that they are solutions in search of a problem," he said. "High impact systems such as the prototype we designed are not common."
Given the relatively little penetration of high technology into most sporting situations and the relative infrequency of life-threatening incidents, it may be hard to persuade clubs to invest in such a system when they would rather spend money on the essentials, such as kits, footballs, nets etc.
"I think this has to be driven by public health concerns," says Harpur. "What we're offering is the obvious. We're not offering something that is ultra sexy. We're not offering something that's going to change the world."
There are issues relating to privacy and data protection, but McHugh and Harpur are working on developing an encryption system. Harpur also points to broad policy issues that each of the potential organisation subscribers would have to thrash out.
"We can provide the technology, but what we can't do is provide the policies which govern access to the technology." Each organisation will undoubtedly have different requirements and policies about what information to store and how to access it, he says.
Harpur says that ISPs already know so much about you, that adding another field about injury history or sporting conduct would be a drop in the ocean. "All were doing is we're adding those extra few pieces that will help the technology help people, in a different sense." Indeed, such an application may be useful in any life-threatening incident. Harpur cites the example of an incident in Sligo three years ago where woman who had a bowl of soup and a meal in a local restaurant died two or three hours later. She died as a result of a reaction to shellfish. What she needed at the time was a shot of ephedrine, he said.
Looking at the non-medical applications of the system, the database can also be used to help referees and coaches to make decisions before or during a game.
Over the summer, Harpur and McHugh will examine commercialisation of the project and are looking for potential backers to get the system off the ground. They plan to meet up with mobile phone companies and ISPs to discuss the possible hosting of the database service.
Harpur talks of the potential market that could develop if their system could be tied into GPS (Global Positioning System) and wearable computing devices, enabling parents to know at all times the whereabouts of their kids. "Once people are sold on the idea that this technology can actually look after them, the market could explode."
I wonder what the youngsters would have to say about that.