Performance Sensors Initiative (PSI)
User-centric biosensors from stadium to society.
Overview
The Performance Sensors Initiative (PSI) is a national framework for developing and validating next-generation sports-sensing technologies in Saudi Arabia and beyond. It builds upon the inaugural Saudi Sports Sensors Workshop's user-centric co-design philosophy, creating a national platform that unites scientists, engineers, athletes, clinicians, industry, and policymakers within a single innovation ecosystem to develop sensing technologies that accelerate innovations beyond sports to healthcare, wellness, and overall human performance.
A User-Centric Model
The initiative engages a reverse-innovation model in which unmet needs are identified by athletes, coaches, and clinicians guided technology development, rather than technologies seeking applications.
- Develop non-invasive, real-time sensors that solve real performance problems, defined by the users who face them.
- Use sport as the first testbed, validating in real conditions (clubs, training centers, Saudi heat).
- Extend proven sensors to wider human performance, then to health and wellness.
- Bring users, researchers, clinicians, and industry together to set priorities.
- Performance: Give users timely, actionable insight to optimize performance, prevent injury, and accelerate recovery, starting with athletes and extending to anyone working in demanding conditions
- Economic: Localize IP and talent in Saudi Arabia, and create startups from validated technologies
- Societal: Translate sensors proven in sport into occupational health, wellness, and preventive healthcare
- KAUST: A national research university catalyzing the ecosystem—from the founding workshop to its biosensing research portfolio and National Transformation Institute
- Intellectual Property (IP): Localized within Saudi Arabia, alongside manufacturing and talent development