Firstbeat’s Player Status Analysis Prevents Athletic Injuries

11 Jan 2018 | tshego

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Firstbeat revealed Player Status Analysis as the next addition to the Firstbeat Sports physiological monitoring platform. Focused on maximising athlete potential with minimal risk of injury, the Player Status Analysis combines sports science with advanced analytics to help guide the application of training loads.

Firstbeat Sports supports the training and development of over 22,000 athletes across 800 teams, including teams in the NBA, NFL, NHL, national and Olympic teams.

The success of Firstbeat Sports is the application of machine learning to interpret beat-to-beat changes in heart rate function. This data is transformed using mathematical models into the physiological information that athletes and coaches need to place training decisions.

Key outputs of the Firstbeat Sports system include real-time training intensity and training load accumulation monitoring, performance readiness checks, fitness assessments, stress and recovery tracking, and sleep quality evaluation tools.

“Monitoring training load and recovery is vital to ensure athletes train at an optimal level to achieve their goals and to avoid overloading,” explains Tero Myllymäki, head of physiology research at Firstbeat. “Based on the science, we know that a certain level of training is needed to build fitness and resilience, but for example, rapid increases of training load can challenge an athletes’ ability to recover and are associated with increased risk of overuse injuries. We are very excited to start piloting this service in the real world, helping professional sports teams easily see how sustainable the training of their athletes is for minimizing the risk of overtraining, developing illness, and injury.”

Modern sports monitoring technology makes it easier to amass large stores of data, documenting, moment-by-moment, everything that is happening with individual players. Mining this data actionable intel is time consuming. With the introduction of Player Status, Firstbeat look to make it easier than ever to extract relevant information from the data.

“The role of strength and conditioning coaches is to help athletes to perform better and to keep them injury free, says Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki, head of Firstbeat Sports. “Around the year, these coaches work to crack the body’s physiological code to best answer the question ‘How should my athletes train today?'”

“Our experience collaborating with top teams and coaches revealed that sifting through the data to find the right information requires a lot of time. And to do it effectively requires coding and spreadsheet skills, all of which takes away from the actual job of coaching. With the introduction of Player Status, we are automating that work and presenting the findings in an easily communicable form to allow coaches to focus on what they do best.”

Having passed the development stage, Player Status Analysis is now being tested in a pilot program with a handful of teams. Final integration with the Firstbeat Sports system for universal availability will take place later this year.