GPSports Performance Analysis:

Michael Fisher - Telegraph Going strong: Matt Diskin's (left) testimonial against Leeds will see the GPS system in use

The club have received permission from the Rugby Football League to try GPSports' GPS system for the first time in Sunday's Matt Diskin testimonial match against Leeds at Headingley, with a view to using it in their Engage Super League opener at Huddersfield on Feb 5.

The device, which is placed in a harness incorporated into a vest, is used to monitor heart-rates and track a player's movement around the field.

"It's a huge advancement in terms of sports science that we're starting to grasp," said McNamara. "It will advance our game massively. If every club and every player had it, it would be great from an international perspective.

"We used them with England in the Four Nations and we gained some fantastic information."

McNamara, who was assistant to former England coach Tony Smith, admits the system could be used to help decide when to substitute a player during a match.

"It's in its early stages but it's amazing what you can do," he said. "It's a live system as well so you're getting a constant feed. Every physical aspect is tracked. You know exactly how far you've run in 80 minutes of rugby league, what speeds you get to and how many impacts you get and what that takes out of the body."

Bradford's new head of physical performance Geoff Evans said: "We will endeavour to use this information to improve all aspects of our preparation and performance for the coming season."

How an Australian decathlete's adventures in GPS technology are changing modern sport

Saracens' Alex Goode, Noah Cato and
Adam Powell training in GPS vests Emma John, The Observer

It was a windsurfer with a satnav who started it all. Adrian Faccioni watched him take to the water with the unwieldy box strapped to his arm so that he could measure his speed. "He had a big laptop in his backpack, a satellite dish on his head and all these cables down his arm," says Faccioni. "I thought, 'Oh boy.'"

The Australian, a former decathlete, saw how valuable a personal GPS device that measured an athlete's movement could be. Six months later, he resigned from his job as a strength and conditioning coach and found a software developer to help pursue his idea.

Within a couple of years they had developed their first device, which could tell a coach, in real time, exactly how fast and how far their athletes were moving. When he showed the technology to coaches of Australian rules football, they leapt at the possibilities.

"The biggest problem team sports have had in the past is they never know how hard an athlete has trained," explains Faccioni, from his home in Canberra. "Heart rate doesn't give a true indication – you can have high heart rate if you don't feel well. Coaches didn't know if players were training hard enough." Adrian Faccioni Adrian Faccioni.

Faccioni's GPS data proved that players were actually training too hard. "Often the sessions didn't look as hard as they were. Players would do some sprinting and then stand around. But they were running multiple kilometres on the Thursday or Friday before a match, and would go into a game carrying residual fatigue."

In the nine years since Faccioni founded his company, the GPS units have become more sophisticated: the most recent is fitted with an accelerometer that measures the effect of sprinting and tackling on the body in terms of G-force.

With all this live data fed to the bench, coaches are able to make far more informed decisions about the physical state of players – in particular, when to make substitutions. "We set up alerts for when a player's heart rate's too high or they've done too much sprinting," explains Faccioni. In Aussie rules, which allows unlimited player "exchanges", the average number of exchanges per match has risen from 20-30 to 70-80 since GPS units were introduced.

Rugby union and football are already embracing the technology, and this year Real Madrid, Man United, Milan and Ajax all put in orders. And Faccioni hopes his units will, eventually, be able to monitor everything that is happening in an athlete's body. "At the moment, measuring glucose or lactic acid or pH is not easy to do live, but there are some early stage technologies doing the rounds."

If he cracks it, the one-time decathlete could change every sport played.