Volga Region University held the III All-Russian scientific and practical conference with international participation “Smart Sport and Tourism: digital transformation in the field of physical culture, sports and tourism” as part of the International Forum Kazan Digital Week 2024.


‘The uniqueness of the conference is in its pronounced applied orientation. Here we discuss cases of digital transformation of sports and tourism and breakthrough trends that have been actively developing in recent years: the use of sports analytics technologies, the use of virtual reality in the training process, and the training of digital athletes. These topics are particularly close to our university, we look forward to co-operation with all interested specialists,’ Rector Rafis Burganov emphasised at the beginning of the plenary session.

 

The organisers received more than 60 scientific papers from scientists and experts from 14 regions of Russia, as well as from the USA and neighbouring countries: Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Turkey.
The first speaker was Olga Vishnyakova, Acting Head of the Department of Economics and Management in Sport, with a report on the development of business methodology based on fijital developments.
The plenary session and sections were filled with interesting ideas: among the speakers were representatives of Russian universities, as well as experts from the Turkmen State Institute of Sport and Physical Culture.

 

‘You can't replace a specialist - it's experience and knowledge. No information system can take into account all details, no matter how smart it is. It is only a tool to improve labour efficiency,‘ noted Semyon Prozorov, a master's student of Volga Region University, who made a report on “Application of computer vision for recording swimmers” performance indicators’.

 

Scientific sections were divided into two directions: medical-biological and pedagogical aspects of training of fijtal athletes and mathematical methods of data analysis in the sphere of sport, service and tourism.

 

Over the last 20 years we have seen the popularity of the Olympic movement fading away,’ said Kamilla Gafurzyanova, Olympic medallist and Honoured Master of Sports of Russia in fencing. - This is my personal pain as an Olympic athlete and a person brought up on Olympic values. Augmented reality is a great tool for attracting a young audience’. 
 

Text: Rustem Ziganshin/Anastasia Smirnova
Photo: Pavel Zheleznyak