In the 2019 NBA playoffs we witnessed a star studded Golden State Warriors team dismantle as a result of injuries, which arguably cost them the NBA championship. It is disheartening to witness a hard-working, passionate athlete be held back from competing out there due to the limitations of their body. Years of persistence, dedication and long hours can be stolen from someone in the blink of an eye due to a career ending injury. In 2014 the knee injuries alone cost the NBA $358 million dollars; overall injuries cost Major League Baseball $1.4billion. Injuries amount to the fourth largest cost to teams and that is only the financial aspect. They also cost you championships. For a prolonged period we attributed injuries chance and misfortune however, in recent years as a result of advanced data analytics we have gained new insight proving otherwise. The advancement of technology and data analytics paved the way for a new approach to treating and preventing sports injuries. Today we are witnessing a new area of sport which entails players sitting out games due to load management. Though the critiques of this practice makes some valid points, a player sitting out a couple of games is far superior to sitting out an entire season.

Conventional methods of assessing and managing sports injuries are highly subjective, relying heavily on athlete’s verbal description of pain and discomfort. An athlete may not assess their own abilities accurately as they may be eager to get back to training and playing, resulting in reinjuries and worse consequences. One of the most widely used methods is determining injury risk using the functional movement screen, which generates a subjective score based on observed ability to complete movements. Further, a commonly used statistic is the Rating of Perceived Exertion Scales.Once again a highly subjective metric as it requires athletes to rate their training intensity. This highly opinionated metric can be affected by confounding factors that result in inconsistencies when drawing conclusions from the data. However, as a result of technological advancements the subjectivity involved in this process is being fizzled out.

Companies like Kitman Labs and Sparta Science have developed integrated hardware and software platforms that are able to individualize athlete injury valuation. Sparta Science tracks athletes making six jumps in ninety seconds with its force plate technology to predict what injuries they’re in danger of suffering, what workouts they need to stay healthy and what position best suits their athletic ability. Their services are used by several professional teams including the Cleveland Cavaliers and Atlanta Falcons. The San Jose Earthquakes’ began working with Sparta in 2016 and by the second half of the season had seen a nearly 50 percent drop in days missed due to injuries. The next season they saw soft tissue injuries decrease by about 80 percent. Their collaborations resulted in high praise from top basketball recruit Andrew Wiggins’ father as he stated that one of the reasons Wiggins went to Kansas to play in 2013 was because to their performance staff and specialization. Kitman Labs uses a revolutionary 3D video-based screening tool that observes an athlete’s jump and is able to identify joints at an accuracy level of a biomechanical lab. From a single exercise they are able to collect and crunch 16,000 data points producing graphs demonstrating the range of motion, weight distribution, balance and strength. The ease of testing, increased efficiency and high accuracy are small pieces of the major revolution happening in sport injury management. However, the biggest advantage of such methods is the ability to quantify what’s going on, hence providing objective assessments for athletes. According to Kitman Labs’, the first professional rugby team to use the platform reduced injuries by over 30 percent and increased player availability by 10 percent over the course of two years.

One of the most important realizations that has led to this disruption in sport injury management is understanding that all humans are different. For many years, sports analysts used different methods and metrics to quantify how to predict and prevent injuries, however, they fell short of achieving substantial conclusions. This led to the discovery that individualization was an important component of the predictive analysis process. An athlete’s past injury history, ethnicity, sex and age were some of the key confounding variables in past analysis. Additionally, even amongst these subcategories each individual’s body could very likely differ from another, hence making it difficult to make umbrella claims about injury prediction. Thankfully, technology has made it possible to individualize this process. With the aid of artificial intelligence and wearables, companies are able to build personalized profiles on athletes, giving them accurate and specialized information about their body that they weren’t able to know before. These insights allow injury prevention through identification of which individuals have elevated injury risk and targeted interventions. Though theoretically these advanced analytical methods may improve predictions, injuries in contact sports will still occur due to the inevitable nature of such sports. Nonetheless, one area that these technologies has a guaranteed benefit is in improving efficiency and reducing the duration of injury rehabilitation. Personalized monitoring and support tools, such as advanced rehabilitation braces which provide dynamic force to specific areas, play a vital role in accelerating the healing process.

These advancements in sports injury assessment and management are still in its early stages. The promising results achieved over the last five years show the potential of this industry, especially given that these models improve exponentially with the increase in data points for their training sets.

It is a common understanding that at the highest level of competition, a game can be decided in a matter of seconds, hence, the integration of technology in sport has played a vital role is withholding consistency. However a team’s postseason ambitions can be crushed before it even begins if they are bedeviled with injuries. Hence, it is now time for sport to take the next step in its evolution and change the dynamic in which injuries are both looked at and dealt with. Thankfully, data analytics has paved the way for such a revolution.