Archive for wearables

For such a small piece of tissue, the ulnar collateral ligament can do a lot of damage when it tears. According to Jon Roegele, 90 professional baseball players underwent Tommy John surgery to repair a damaged UCL in the last calendar year, costing teams tens of millions of dollars and months of lost service time. Young prospects, grizzled veterans, pitchers, catchers, outfielders, flamethrowers and junkballers: all went under the knife and emerged with the infamous long, curved scar.

The high stakes go a long way to explain why Glenn Fleisig, Ph.D., research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute, was invited to speak on the epidemic at last weekend’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Fleisig — who also serves as chairman of USA Baseball’s Medical and Safety Committee, an advisor for Little League Baseball, and on Major League Baseball’s Elbow Task Force — presented “Analytics of the Tommy John Injury Epidemic” Saturday morning to discuss the ASMI’s research, dispel some common myths, and talk about the “Pitch Smart” guidelines he helped develop.

Even in the few months since the Pitch Smart guidelines were released, Fleisig said he was “blown away” by the amount of positive feedback he’s received.

“For 20 years, Dr. [James] Andrews and myself have been giving guidelines that have been pretty well received in general by those in medicine,” he said in an interview. “Since the Pitch Smart guidelines came out, we’ve seen the same kind of response from coaches and parents across baseball.”

But Fleisig still devoted a significant amount of time to clearing up misconceptions about the surgery’s success rate (only two-thirds of MLB pitchers who underwent Tommy John surgery made it back to the majors and stayed there) and effect on pitchers (pitchers do not see a bump in performance immediately after the surgery).

The highlight of Fleisig’s talk was a discussion of the risk factors associated with UCL injuries. Fleisig reported the results of a recent study into the biomechanics of 80 minor league pitchers — 40 of whom had returned from Tommy John surgery, and 40 healthy controls. The paper looked at a number of potential risk factors (including amount of arm abduction, stride length, and the infamous “inverted W“), but found no difference between the mechanics of the previously injured and healthy pitchers. Fleisig admitted, however, that the study was not predictive: by looking at the biomechanics of only those pitchers who successfully returned to pitching, the study overlooked any mechanical flaws that had since been corrected, as well as any biomechanical issues in those pitchers who were unable to make a successful comeback.

A better predictor of UCL injuries, Fleisig said, was overuse. A recent ten-year study of 476 adolescent baseball pitchers found that pitchers who threw over 100 innings in a year were three times more likely to be injured; those who regularly threw over 80 pitches in a year more than four times; those who pitched for at least eight consecutive months five times; and those who regularly pitched fatigued 36 times more likely to suffer a UCL injury.

“I hear people say that throwing isn’t a natural motion,” Fleisig said during his presentation. “Throwing is natural. Pitching at max effort, 100 or more times in a game, that’s what’s not natural.”

Fleisig believes overuse of young pitchers is largely responsible for the rise in professional pitchers getting Tommy John surgery, even as organizations are placing increasingly strict limits on prized prospects like Dylan Bundy and Joba Chamberlain.

“A lot of the time, the damage has already been done by the time they get to pro ball,” Fleisig said. “When you pitch, you produce lots of microscopic tears that can heal with rest, but if you pitch too much, then [the UCL] is like a frayed rope, and there’s not much you can do.”

Fleisig’s group has calculated that a 90-mph fastball puts as much as 100 newton meters (N-m) of torque on the elbow. Fortunately, this force is instantaneous or UCLs would be tearing on virtually every pitch. But the ligament still absorbs a significant part of that force; as muscles tire, the amount absorbed by the UCL can increase, leading to the dramatic increase of UCL injuries in pitchers who regularly throw when fatigued. Fleisig said that strength and conditioning can help reduce the risk of injury, but stressed the importance of the entire kinetic chain, from legs to trunk to arm muscles.

“I wish I could say there was one key to avoiding injuries — and that would make a good article — but that’s not reality,” Fleisig said. “The secret isn’t the legs, the secret isn’t the arms, the secret isn’t the trunk, it’s the whole body.”

In addition to his work with ASMI and the sport’s governing bodies, Fleisig also serves as a consultant for Motus Global, a movement analysis company whose mThrow sleeve for pitchers will be available to the public this spring. The headline number produced by the system will be a measurement of workload, derived from the sum of the torque put on the elbow across all throws a player makes, including pitching in game situations, warmups, and drills such as long toss. The sleeve (and the metrics it provides) are still in the early stages, but Fleisig is confident that it represents an improvement in teams’ understanding of workload.

“We don’t know what the right exact formula [for workload] is,” Fleisig said. “For instance, if you throw two throws at 50 N-m, is that the same amount of danger to your elbow as one throw at 100 N-m? Probably not. But before the Motus sleeve, workload was just added up by people counting how many throws someone did.”

Fleisig admits, however, that users will rely too heavily on the system’s workload calculation, especially at the amateur level where coaches, trainers, and players may lack the rapport to establish when a pitcher is truly fatigued.

“The potential customers for the Motus sleeve are not only pro pitchers but also high school kids,” Fleisig said. “I would hope that the pro teams would click through to see the extra data the sleeve produces, whereas I think the summarized information might be the best for many of the amateurs.”

A number of companies aim to improve further on Motus Global’s innovation, and are working on systems that can automatically capture full-body kinematic data without markers. Fleisig does not consult on any of these projects, but has seen some of them in action. Most, including the system Sportvision presented at Saberseminar last summer, require manual digitization, where a human observer annotates the location of the pitcher’s joints at every frame. But despite the demand for automated systems, Fleisig stressed that these technologies are only a tool in the arsenal of coaches, trainers, and pitchers to prevent injuries and improve performance.

“Biomechanics experts and technology are not the keys to optimizing pitcher safety and performance,” he said. “The key will be the expertise of coaches to use this new information.”

The MIT Sloan School of Business will host its ninth annual sports analytics conference at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center next weekend. The conference attracts a host of luminaries from the sports business world, including general managers, owners, players and journalists. But over the last few years, a number of technology companies have made their presence felt as well, giving attendees a glimpse of the present and future of technology in sports.

Last year’s conference featured a number of innovative products and big announcements. The highlight, of course, was Major League Baseball Advanced Media’s unveiling of its StatCast system. A number of wearable sensor companies also made presentations: Adidas demonstrated the miCoach system that the German national team used en route to their World Cup win last summer, Zebra showed off the RFID tags that made its NFL partnership possible, and Diamond Kinetics let attendees try its SwingTracker bat sensor before it hit the market. The multitude of hands-on experiences with the sensors made the hallway outside the panel discussions feel a bit like a carnival midway.

A number of this year’s panels will also revolve around new technology. The Wearable Technology panel on Saturday morning features Zebra’s general manager for sports Eric Petrosinelli and Catapult’s North American president Brian Kopp. These two, along with Cleveland Browns receiver Andrew Hawkins and Golden State Warriors assistant general manager Mark Lacob, will discuss the adoption of wearable technology, and discuss how teams are using data from wearable sensors to improve training and in-game decision making. No baseball devices are included in this panel, but the American Sports Medicine Institute’s Glenn Fleisig (who also consults for Motus Global) will be speaking on the Tommy John epidemic at the same time. Zebra’s general manager Jill Stelfox will also participate in a panel describing the “next-generation” statistics their sensors have brought to the NFL.

For those more interested in learning about technology’s impact on the fan experience, there is also a panel on “Designing the Stadium of the Future.” Some of the discussion will undoubtedly center on improving the fan experience, a familiar refrain for returning attendees. But stadium design company Populous is sending Jon Knight, a senior principal, to talk about design innovations and new technologies being incorporated into new stadiums. And YinzCam, a company dedicated to “the ultimate mobile fan experience,” will be on hand to silence any grousing about getting fans off their phones.

And there will be plenty of smaller companies making their debut on the big stage. The Startup Trade Show features 11 companies that run the gamut from fan experience apps to markerless motion capture systems to training managers and fitness guides. The companies will also compete in the Blitz Competition, where these startups pitch their business model to a panel of entrepreneurs for bragging rights and a small cash prize.

And there are a number of other interesting components, from the research papers to the conversation with new MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred (which is sure to touch on the new StatCast system slated to be rolled out this season). Tickets for the conference sold out months ago, but Sloan usually broadcasts the conference over YouTube. Those willing to pay for the subscription (or at least sign up for the 14-day free trial) can enjoy the videos without having to brave the frozen wastelands of South Boston.

(Photo by Matt Sullivan)

The newest update to Zepp’s baseball and golf app includes a new feature to personalize users’ training based on swing analysis.

The feature, called Zepp Insights, will produce reports that recommend drills to help users focus on personalized weakness in their swings. The reports will be delivered weekly, provided the user takes at least 30 swings during that week. Using millions of swings collected from its users, Zepp will identify which of the five calculated swing parameters — bat speed at impact, maximum hand speed, time to impact, vertical angle at impact, and attack angle — is most in need of improvement. The report will then recommend training drills and tips from their existing video library.

The new update will also include swing goals across all metrics based on the user’s skill level. In previous versions of the app, only bat speed goals were set automatically, with additional goals relying on user input to tag the hit type and direction.

In addition to the drills and overviews featuring Cubs hitting coach John Mallee, Zepp also provides swing data and video of a number of MLB hitters, including Mike Trout, David Ortiz, and Giancarlo Stanton. The pros offer advice on more “real-world” scenarios, such as staying back on a curveball and hitting the ball the other way.

CEO Jason Fass said the new update provided personalized, actionable data to its users, better helping them improve their swings.

“Our goal is to provide analysis that not only collects numbers from the sensor, but offers ways to improve those numbers through content in our app,” Fass said. “We need to engage and elevate athletes by personalizing tips gleaned from their captured data.”

There are four inches of fresh snow on the Brown University campus, but in a little office in the Pizzitola Center, junior Tim McKeithan is training to recognize sliders and curveballs.

McKeithan is tracking simulated trajectories on a computer screen while wearing an electroencephalograph (EEG) headset. It’s part of a new system developed by deCervo, a New York-based startup, to measure hitters’ decision-making process.

deCervo is led by Jordan Muraskin and Jason Sherwin, who met during their doctorate studies at Columbia University. Although the company is still in its infancy, the pair have been working on the underlying technology for several years, and have been featured in a number of prestigious publications. And teams are starting to take notice — Brown is the fourth NCAA Division I program to work with deCervo, joining Illinois, Bradley, and Ivy League rival Columbia. Sherwin also said the group was “in talks” with some Major League Baseball teams, and hopes to work with professional hitters during spring training.

The program relies on the Advanced Brain Monitoring B-Alert X10, a wireless EEG headset. The nine electrodes are attached to flexible plastic strips, and are evenly distributed around the subject’s scalp. The signals from the electrodes are sampled at 256 Hz and transmitted wirelessly via Bluetooth for storage on a personal computer.

Once the subject is wearing the headset and the signal quality has been checked, the training can begin using deCervo’s custom-designed software. Before each pitch, a pitch type — fastball, curveball, or slider — is displayed on a blank screen for a second or two. The label disappears, and a green “ball” moves according to one of the three trajectories. If the pitch trajectory matches the type displayed at the beginning, the subject presses a key, representing the decision to swing. The program stores the accuracy and response time for each trial, as well as the EEG signals recorded from the headset.

After McKeithan finishes his training and removes the headset, Muraskin processes the data and explains the results. His software allows them to break down the EEG signal into various components, with markers at the trial start, the moment the pitch first appears, and the time of key press. Muraskin also plots McKeithan’s accuracy as a function of reaction time.

“There’s usually a jump around 300 or 350 milliseconds where the player really starts recognizing the pitch,” Muraskin explained. But, to his surprise, McKeithan has improved, and is starting to recognize the pitches around 270 ms.

“That’s really good,” Muraskin said.

deCervo (whose name is from the French for “of the brain”) are not the only company training baseball players’ brains. Aaron Seitz from UC Riverside gave a talk at last August’s Saberseminar on the improvements the Highlanders’ baseball team saw after training with Ultimeyes, his vision training game. And Boston-based Neuroscouting also offers brain training solutions for elite baseball players. And although Sherwin did not claim to be an expert in Neuroscouting’s techniques, he had heard enough to draw a comparison between the two companies.

“In our research we’ve worked with musicians, with soldiers, with athletes,” Sherwin said. “We see that there are certain brain circuits that are tuned towards whatever context or expertise that person has. And we think that our tech is more efficiently tapping in to what those circuits are doing, and how well they’re doing.”

Support for this belief comes from the differences in performance deCervo sees between baseball players and non-baseball players, as well as the difference between players of different skill levels. Sherwin (who has no baseball playing background beyond high school) contrasted his performance while developing the program with that of McKeithan, who correctly determined whether or not to swing 86 percent of the time.

“It’s a very high number that we see consistently with our players,” Sherwin said. “Jordan and I made this experiment and we still haven’t been able to hit 86 percent accuracy, and what’s even more amazing is that their response time is significantly lower than ours.”

Sherwin also explained that better players produced both higher accuracies and lower response times, suggesting that the program could not only separate good from bad players but also identify the strengths and weaknesses of individual players. So Sherwin and Muraskin began developing profiles, based on each subject’s results, to suggest areas for potential improvement.

“Nobody wants to air their dirty laundry on the field,” Sherwin said. “You don’t want to look like a schmuck missing the slider low and away in the game, you’d rather practice that. Better to do it in the privacy of your own home, on an app or something.”

For now, though, deCervo isn’t suggesting specific practice plans for players, but instead are working with coaches to confirm their findings and discuss how coaches will work to fix each player’s agreed-upon weaknesses.

“The first step is having some kind of common ground,” Sherwin said, “Us showing that we’re measuring what we think is relevant for hitting a baseball, and them also recognizing that this is relevant for hitting a baseball.”

And so far, the coaches they’ve worked with have been receptive to the feedback deCervo is providing. Sherwin said he and Muraskin were excited by their early feedback, especially from Brown head coach Grant Achilles.

“Coach Achilles here, his line is emblazoned in my memory, he said, ‘You guys are showing on a statistical and empirical level what we’re seeing with our players.'”

Grant Achilles took over the head coaching job on an interim basis midway through last season, and is about to start his first full season in the top job. Achilles and his staff use a number of advanced metrics to measure his team’s performance, but doesn’t see himself as a sabermetric pioneer.

“Am I somebody that Bill James will be quoting in his book? Probably not,” Achilles said. “But it’s certainly something that’s growing in baseball, and if you don’t pay attention to it, you’re going to be left behind.”

Before coming to Brown, Achilles was an assistant coach at Wake Forest and Georgetown, big-time athletic programs with big-time athletic department budgets. But the comparatively smaller budget of Brown has forced Achilles to think more creatively about ways to improve his players. Achilles first heard about deCervo through an alumnus, who contacted the new coach after reading about the technology in a research journal. Achilles struck up a relationship with the company’s founders, and the Bears began a training program in December. Although it’s too early to see results in game situations, Achilles is already excited by what he’s seen.

“The actual data they’ve kicked back has given traction to stuff that we’ve seen as coaches but you really can’t explain,” Achilles said. “This data gives us a clearer understanding of why guys are either struggling with pitches or doing well in other situations, so it’s truly backed up the results we’ve seen on-field and in practice.”

The immediate future for deCervo, aside from branching into MLB, is developing a single piece of software that teams could use themselves (after some training) to train players and track their improvements over the course of a season. Sherwin and Muraskin also plan to develop a simpler mobile version of the software for players to use without the EEG headset.

“What’s interesting about the app is that given that we’ve done this [data collection] with a bunch of players and a bunch of non-players, we have a database now of what the neural predecessors look like on average in terms of the behavioral metrics,” Sherwin said. “So if we measure the behavioral metrics, we have an approximate measure of what the neural response looks like beforehand, give them an idea of what their most likely neural response is.”

deCervo is also starting to look outside baseball, working with an NHL team to measure how well goalies recognize puck trajectories and offensive formations. The company has also started to work with the Columbia football team, measuring how fast defensive linemen get off the line when the ball is snapped.

“All this stuff we’re doing right now, we’re starting pretty simplistic and building up,” Muraskin said. “There are things [teams] are doing that fit in well with what we’re doing but we would bring a more rigorous, scientific approach.”

Correction: A quote has been changed in the tenth paragraph from “towards whatever concept or expertise that person has” to “whatever context.”

Football coaches at every level have long relied on game film to judge their teams’ performance. But this year, NFL teams have partnered with Zebra Technologies to more accurately track their players’ position and speed on the field.

The real-time location solution (RLTS) used by the NFL relies on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags worn by the players in their shoulder pads. Each RFID tag broadcasts its location 25 times per second to the approximately 20 receivers located around the stadium. From this single sensor, the MotionWorks server can determine a player’s location on the field and speed. By adding a second sensor, Zebra can also track a player’s direction and orientation. The sensors, placed on the player’s shoulder pads, are less than an inch in diameter, and include a battery designed to last an entire season. This improves the usability and scalability of the solution, since teams won’t need to spend time and energy removing, charging, and reinstalling the sensors.

The result is a system that can track all 22 players on a field with an accuracy of a few inches, according to Zebra’s data sheet. According to general manager for sports applications Eric Petrosinelli, this gives Zebra’s solution a clear advantage over other solutions based on technology like global positioning systems (GPS).

“Other solutions aren’t providing anywhere near the accuracy or operational simplicity of our solution,” Petrosinelli said. “They don’t really have scalable solutions.”

The NFL would seem to agree: Zebra won what Petrosinelli called a “bake-off” in 2013 among a number of vendors selling competing systems. Their reward was a multi-year contract with the NFL. As training camp was getting underway, the NFL announced that Zebra receivers would be placed in 17 NFL stadiums (specifically, Atlanta, Baltimore, Carolina, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Green Bay, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, New England, New Orleans, Oakland, San Francisco, St. Louis and Washington) and added RFID tags to every player’s pads. Receivers will be installed in the remaining stadiums, as well as “one-off” stadiums like London’s Wembley Stadium and Pro Bowl site Aloha Stadium, during the offseason.

The data generated by the system is currently controlled by the league to prevent the handful of teams with the solution in place from gaining an unfair advantage from the data. A few teams — the 49ers, Lions, and Saints — will also have Zebra solutions installed at their practice facilities. But for now, teams and fans will have to be content with the samples like these that have been shown in the Thursday night games.

Although the MotionWorks solution may be new to the sports world, Zebra has developed and used similar RFID-based solutions for years in the manufacturing industry. But Petrosinelli said the technology adapted surprisingly well to the new application.

“One thing we’ve been pleasantly surprised by is the operational ease in deploying and operating the solution,” Petrosinelli said.

Zebra’s future plans include expanding vertically to other levels of football, as well as horizontally to other sports. Petrosinelli said his company was in talks with a number of organizations (though he couldn’t give their names) to apply Zebra’s technology to their fields.

“We’ve spoken to people both domestically and globally,” he said. “When you win a contract like [the NFL’s], a lot of people take notice of that.”

And while Petrosinelli said Zebra was considering partnering with other companies to incorporate data from sensors like accelerometers or heart rate monitors, the company currently has no plans to design such sensors internally.

“We’re not a consumer wearables company,” Petrosinelli said. “The way our system is designed, we could be a transporter of that information, but we’re not going to be in that business.”

The professional services network PricewaterhouseCoopers, or more commonly known as PwC, recently had a webcast on the future of wearable technology and its market. All PwC CISs are free to register for and view, with the only requirement being a valid email address. They offer a wide range of webcasts and data ranging from automotive news to technology to health services.

Things kicked off with data from a 1,000-person poll showing 314 of them owned something defined as wearable tech. Thus the question of “what is considered wearable tech” is presented and answered. Ranging from literally the head to the feet, devices from headphones that monitor heart and steps (such as Dash Headphones, warning: auto-playing ad) to chips inserted and paired with shoes, plus smart clothing, wrist bands, watches and of course smart glasses were all considered wearable technology.

With a clear market for the fitness minded person as well as the tech-savant people, the webcast cites an interested trend. Another study showed one in five (of voting age) Americans own some sort of wearable tech. That 20% ownership rate mirrors the same rate of people who owned a tablet in 2012. Now approaching 2015, American tablet ownership is up to 40% — even when considering the slow sales of tablets for some retailers and particularly Apple iPad sales dropping for the third straight quarter.

The same study included a poll, with speculative questions, arguably the most interesting answers were 46% thought obesity rates would drop and 42% believe the average person’s athletic ability will improve dramatically. While there is no data yet back up these figures, it is easy to see why PwC expects the wearable market to double within two years in the same manner as tablets did. In 2013 two million wearable devices were sold in the United States. If estimates for the holiday season prove accurate, that number will jump to 19 million this year.

This age group is of particular interest to wearable tech companies. Millennials are defined as ages 18-34 by PwC represent a massive market to cater to. A study by Barkley — who differed and defined a millennial as someone aged 19-37 — claimed the millennial generation are responsible for more than $200 billion in buying power annually. Entertainment is important to them and they are the cord cutting generation. If wearables can help bring them their sports, health information or productivity in a better and more streamlined fashion, then everyone wins.

For a concise breakdown of most of the covered topics, check out PwC’s video.

(Thanks to PwC.com for the screengrabs of slides and TecSplash for the header image.)

I had big hopes for my Pebble smartwatch. I envisioned a time when I could just leave my phone in my pocket or bag, and go hours and hours without having to dig it out. I could be such an engaging tablemate at restaurants. I could ride public transit and smirk at all the suckers who are glued to their devices. I would be free. Free from distraction, free from the rectangular device that has taken over my life.

Don’t get me wrong, my Pebble works just fine. It does exactly what I wanted and even more. But I am still a servant. I’m still always glancing, always clicking. Only it’s at my wrist instead of my phone. While this is an upgrade of sorts, I have learned to accept and embrace my technology overlords. Everything is still coming to me — every email from my fantasy league, every Google chat from my friends, every text from my wife — it’s just coming in a slightly more convenient way. That is, if you assume glancing at your wrist is more convenient than glancing at your phone

The Pebble has a few useful apps, but its main selling point is notifications. It relies on whatever notifications my iPhone sends me. If the phone gets it, the watch gets it. The usual fare is offered — email, text messages, etc. — but it also works with notifications from nearly any other app. When I go to a ballgame, my watch (via my MLB At the Ballpark app) welcomes me to the field. When a player on my fantasy roster has been put on the DL, my watch (via my fantasy apps) alerts me. When my beloved Astros are about to take the field, my wrist vibrates. The same goes for when they take or give up the lead. It goes on and on. This may sound annoying, but I wouldn’t be honest if I said I didn’t love it. The sports fan in me loves the updates, and the tech geek in me loves that it’s happening on my watch.

But the Pebble is a one-way street for the most part. There’s no communicating back to it. If I miss the scoring alert of the Astros game, I need to pull out my phone. If I want to check my roster to make sure my matchups are correct, out comes the phone. It’s passive. It’s a message from a carrier pigeon. It’s a fortune cookie.

Which is why the news surrounding the new round of wearable devices is so encouraging as a sports fan. Earlier this year, Google announced Android Wear, a platform for running Android apps on third-party wearable hardware, which may be getting a significant update soon. Samsung just announced their line of Gear S watches, which offers both voice and teeny-tiny keyboard input. And, of course, Apple is expected to announce their own line of wearable tech next week. The details are still fuzzy on this device, but the ability to run current iOS apps (or at least modded versions of them) isn’t out of the question. All these devices offer a good deal more of interaction. Finally, there will be a tin can on the other end of the string.

Android Wear can already offer some help for sports fans. The integration with voice search allows the user to just simply ask their watch what the score of the Giants game is. If Apple integrates Siri with it’s watches, it should allow this functionality as well. Android Wear offers pushed notifications much like the Pebble, as well. As wearable technology becomes more common, it’s easy to see tighter integration with fantasy apps, news apps from ESPN or CBS Sports, even the ability to simply pull up scores from across the league without the need for pushed alerts. The ability to change a fantasy roster from your wrist, or send your friend a taunting text after seeing his favorite team’s latest score without the need for digging a phone out of a pocket or purse is on the horizon. Who wouldn’t want to see a towering Giancarlo Stanton home run pushed to their wrist? An injury report from their favorite team at the ready with their phone still tucked away? Is MLB.tv and Sunday Ticket streaming video on a watch that far down the road?

I may be getting carried away, or I could be just scratching the surface. Pebble’s Kickstarter ended in May of 2012. A little over two years later, we’re ready to accept the next great swarm of wearable tech into (and onto) our arms. If things play out more or less as expected, I’ll still have my phone in my bag. That familiar blue glow will be coming from from wrist instead.

(Header photo via Maurizio Pesce)