For the athletes who compete at the highest levels of sport, preventing injury can sometimes seem impossible. And in most cases, it is.
Force plates and smart scales As a rugby and football player, Phil Wagner got injured a lot. And to his own dismay, these repeated injuries are what forced him to stop playing altogether. In 2016, Wagner founded Sparta Science — and its force plate technology and analytics software is now used by professional sports teams across the country, like the Baltimore Ravens and the Cleveland Browns.
It took Wagner over a decade to develop the machine learning technology and software to not only be able to recognize certain bodily metrics but to sort through and organize the treasure trove of data it was collecting. Stroupe is a professional performance trainer with over two decades of experience and coach to the biggest names in the MLB and NFL, including Kansas City Chiefs quarterback and Super Bowl champion, Patrick Mahomes. Technology hasn’t always been a big part of his coaching practice, mostly because in the past when he was starting out it was costly.
The corresponding app charts the data into visualizations broken down by category. There’s no interactive touchscreen, either. That’s what Stroupe likes about Whoop — its simple interface, which he says is easy enough for the athletes themselves to consume, as well as its focus on recovery and identification of stress indicators. He uses this data to start conversations with his players to help them identify and eliminate recovery roadblocks.
RFID sensors Inside the shoulder pads of every NFL player lie two highly sensitive, nickel-sized radio-frequency identification sensors, or RFID tags for short. Even the ball has one. As do the referees and yardsticks. And all of these tags communicate with one another and send mountains of real-time information every second to the many receiver boxes placed strategically inside every NFL stadium across the country.
One of the ways Zebra’s technology helps professional teams analyze injury risk is by marrying the data gathered by RFID and video playback the NFL is known for.