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Rio Olympics gets high-tech touch from GE

Preparation: The Carioca Arena, which encloses more than 38,000 square meters and is built for the Rio Olympics, will host basketball during the upcoming Olympics

Grace D. Amianti (The Jakarta Post)
Rio de Janeiro
Thu, August 4, 2016

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Rio Olympics gets high-tech touch from GE

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span class="inline inline-center">Preparation: The Carioca Arena, which encloses more than 38,000 square meters and is built for the Rio Olympics, will host basketball during the upcoming Olympics.(Courtesy of GE)

By the end of this week, the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games organizers are set to show the world the fruits of their herculean efforts in preparing the colossal tournament.

Amid skepticism and a series of challenges, including an outbreak of the Zika virus, a political crisis and security concerns, the Rio Olympics organizers and the Brazilian people can breathe a sigh of relief, with US-based giant General Electric (GE) taking the initiative to become the games’ worldwide partner.

The company has had a strong presence in Brazil since 1919 when it started operations in South America’s biggest economy, investing in various sectors, including the GE Celma, an aircraft engine service and overhaul facility in Petropolis, a mountainous area on the outskirts of Rio.

As a worldwide partner for the Rio Olympics from Aug. 5 to 21, GE is implementing a “digital industrial technology” concept to deliver critical infrastructure for the Games.

GE is mainly working in four areas in the Rio Olympics, namely lighting, healthcare, energy and digital performance management, and has been involved as The Olympic Partner (TOP) sponsors for a decade, with more than 1,000 infrastructure projects worth US$1.5 billion under its belt.

That includes 170 projects in Rio — also for the Rio Paralympics Games in September — as well as 150 at the 2012 London Games, 75 at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and 400 at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

It is also scheduled to continue future Olympic projects during the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, Japan. As a giant industrial firm, GE acknowledges itself to be a non-traditional sponsor for the Olympics, which normally partner with global consumer brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Samsung and Visa, but promised to deliver the best performance of its technology to ensure that the Games would leave a long-lasting effect.

Chris Katsuleres, GE’s director of Olympic marketing and sales, said the Olympic Games were a “matching embodiment of GE”, while affirming that the games would help GE’s brand grow a strong reputational record outside of the US.

“Our story is through technology. A lot of other partners are on the emotional side, while ours is more about tangible contributions. We are proud to leave a meaningful legacy,” he said.

He offered an example of this legacy: At the Sochi Winter Games two years ago, the company’s healthcare division left a mobile mammography unit to serve remote areas in Krasnodarskiy region of Russia, where access to breast cancer screening technology remains a challenge. The unit has up to now served over 5,000 women, helping them to identify cancers earlier and deliver life-saving outcomes.

For the Rio Olympics, GE is donating 24 items of medical technology to a public hospital, the Souza Aguiar Municipal Hospital, which is one of the biggest emergency units in Latin America and the main public trauma hospital in the city of Rio.

The $2 million equipment, including X-rays, CT scans and anesthesia machines, are expected to increase surgery capacity by 30 percent at the hospital, which performs a monthly average of 600 operations and serves approximately 7,500 patients.

The legacy relates strongly to GE’s healthcare project during the games, for which it is equipping temporary polyclinics at the Olympic Park with its advanced medical imaging technologies, including two MRIs that are expected to serve more than 1,000 scans throughout the games.

Not far from the Olympic Park, which is located in Barra da Tijuca, the western part of the city, a referral hospital called the Americas Medical City is also preparing itself with GE’s medical technology to serve athletes in need of more serious treatment.

For the first time, furthermore, athletes competing in the games will be able to utilize GE’s latest electronic medical records (EMR) technology, replacing the existing paper-based medical records. The equipment allows medical practitioners and trainers to determine an earlier and more accurate diagnosis as well as recovery plan for the athletes.

“This is the first time in the Olympics that athletes’ health data can be accessed through gadgets and other electronic devices,” said Luis Verzegnassi, GE Brazil’s commercial director of healthcare.

Also, in areas directly related to the games’ success, GE, playing its role as one of the world’s major lighting producers, is providing the Rio Olympics with 200,000 energy-efficient lightbulbs for at least 40 venues, athlete’s village and public spots covering more than 46 million square feet, through its clean energy startup company, Current.

As a legacy from the lighting division, Current is donating more than 1,600 connected LED fixtures installed in Flamengo Park and Lapa in Rio that will consume at least 50 percent less energy as part of a gift related to the company’s 2016 Olympics involvement.

As a major player in the energy sector, GE prepares 3,000 Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) units to ensure more than 5 billion people globally enjoy the event’s broadcasts without any interruption, also known as “no-breaks”.

The Rio Olympics is also the first time for GE to be fully responsible for electrical supply for the International Broadcast Center (IBC) building, which covers 85,000 square meters in the Olympic Park and will host at least 10,000 media professionals from about 180 media outlets.

“The IBC consumes about 20 percent of the Games’ extra power demand, or equal to approximately 50 megawatts of electricity, which is sufficient for a city with 200,000 citizens,” said Alfredo A. de Mello, GE’s commercial leader for the Olympics.

In an effort to repeat the success of sponsoring host teams in two preceding games, GE is also deploying for the first time at the Rio Olympics its new technology to improve athlete’s performances, especially members of the Brazilian canoe and kayak teams.

The program, called “digital performance management”, is expected to strengthen the teams’ medal prospects. With real-time data and analysis stored in the Cloud, trainers can use a tablet to analyze their athletes’ performance with a more advanced technique.

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