Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 9, 2015

Five kilos.

That’s how much weight 7-foot-3 Kristaps Porzingis told his former big-man coach in Spain he’s gained since starting the Knicks’ weight-training program five weeks ago.

… U.S. Soccer technical director Jurgen Klinsmann has said on multiple occasions that Olympic qualification is one of the federation’s main priorities in 2015. The Caleb Porter-coached U.S. U-23 team failed to qualify for the 2012 Olympics, and Herzog knows the pressure is on him to succeed.

American Soccer Now’s Brian Sciaretta spoke with Herzog from the team’s camp in England to discuss the team’s progress heading into qualifying.

Reflective Practice is “an improvement tool to produce a change in practice” (Knowles et al., 2006) and can be applied in a personal as well as a professional context (Ghaye, 2001; cited in Anderson, Knowles & Gilbourne, 2004). Knowles, Gilbourne, Cropley and Dugdill (2014) describe reflective practice as a complicated procedure which allows experience to be converted into learning (p.10). Reflecting in such a way comprises of cognitive processing where expert knowledge and professional practice are combined in order to encourage knowledge-in-action (Boud, Koegh & Walker, 1985; cited in Anderson, Knowles & Gilbourne, 2004).

Wearable health and fitness trackers are among the most popular gadgets around. More than 13 million of them were sold globally last year, according to GfK, a German market research firm. And these numbers are only expected to grow as more sophisticated versions hit the market, with claims that they can monitor vital signs such as blood pressure, heart rate, and even hydration levels.

But a few problems with activity trackers must be addressed before they can be used as medical monitors. Trackers tend to contain too few sensors, must be charged frequently, and can only be worn on the wrist or clipped to clothing. And perhaps most troubling, they aren’t accurate enough.

“Their level of accuracy is low because as a consumer product they haven’t gone through the rigorous regulatory approval of medical devices,” says IEEE Fellow Veena Misra. “But users want this type of technology.”

… It seems that several other GPS users around the world were experiencing the same frustrations and could see the same potential in the technology as I could. Not long after, I received a ‘cold call’ from a UK number, I thought it was a ‘wrong number’, but I just had a feeling I should take this call. Nick Broad was on the line. He said that he had heard about the work I was doing and wanted to get together. I remember laughing and
reminding him that Sydney was not quite ‘next door’ to south-west London. Nick’s drive,
enthusiasm and focus broke down barriers and brought people together, a true pioneer.

After a brief trip to Chelsea FC in 2010 I began working closely with Nick and he became instrumental in the ongoing development of ADI, his ability to challenge my way of thinking and see the end game earlier than anyone else helped us develop a strong friendship. Over the course of the next twelve months ADI expanded to provide services across international rugby, football, rugby league and Australian Rules Football.

Google and Novartis are working on two smart contact lenses, and news broke this week about both of them: A new patent application sheds light on how Google might power its glucose-sensing contact lens, just a week after partner Novartis told a Swiss newspaper it was on track for human trials in 2016 of an autofocus lens for presbyopia patients.

Patent applications don’t always presage exactly what a product will look like, as they are crafted to cover a broad range of possibilities. For instance, in addition to glucose sensing, Google’s patent leaves the door open for external-facing sensors in the contact lens for things like temperature and air quality.

But perhaps most interesting is a suggestion of how the smart contact lens will be powered — something that a number of experts were curious about when the lens was first announced. Apparently an external device will power the sensor, and it could be handheld or embedded into a companion wearable.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably bought a wearable that tracks your steps in hopes it will inspire you to walk more. And if you’re also like me, you learned quickly what it takes to reach your daily goal and started leaving your gadget collecting dust in a drawer.

This is not a unique scenario. According to Endeavor Partners, a market researcher, while at least 1 in 10 Americans over the age of 18 owns a tracking device like the Fitbit or Nike Fuelband, more than a third of those who get them abandon them within a few months. The reasons given include meaningless stats, poor design, and loss of interest.

This workshop is designed for physicians, athletic trainers, physician assistants, nurses, occupational or physical therapists, students, researchers, strength and conditioning specialists, sports medicine and orthopedic health care professionals.

Charlie Davies went to Wilmington, Delaware shortly after leaving the hospital following the horrific car crash that nearly killed him in late 2009. He had just spent four days in a medically-induced coma, and had broken, torn or shattered just about everything you can break, tear or shatter. Most of the injuries were to his legs, which meant that the then-23-year-old national team striker’s once-promising career likely was over. The doctors certainly thought so. He was very lucky to be alive.

But Davies, still in a wheelchair, went to Wilmington and rented an apartment that would be his home for many of the 17 months it would take him to get back on the field for a competitive match. The first day Jim Hashimoto came to see him, all he could do with Davies was hold his shattered leg in the air for 10 seconds at a time. Later, “Hash,” as he mostly goes by—rhymes with “posh”—got Davies to walk down the hallway with one crutch. And eventually, Hash rebuilt Davies to the point where he could resume his professional career, against towering odds.

Lord Kelvin’s adage, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it,” is intertwined with our lives on a daily basis in many different ways. Having a doctor measure your blood pressure, taking an exam in school, checking your tire pressure with a tire gauge, and tasting food to see if it needs more seasoning are all forms of measurement and assessment. Training athletes should be no different. As a matter of fact, we should take more in-depth assessments since we are dealing with human biology and physiology.

Given a decision that requires less than half a second for evaluating the characteristics of the incoming pitch and generating a motor response, hitting a baseball potentially requires unique perception–action coupling to achieve high performance. We designed a rapid perceptual decision-making experiment modeled as a Go/No-Go task yet tailored to reflect a real scenario confronted by a baseball hitter. For groups of experts (Division I baseball players) and novices (non-players), we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) while they performed the task. We analyzed evoked EEG single-trial variability, contingent negative variation (CNV), and pre-stimulus alpha power with respect to the expert vs. novice groups. We found strong evidence for differences in inhibitory processes between the two groups, specifically differential activity in supplementary motor areas (SMA), indicative of enhanced inhibitory control in the expert (baseball player) group. We also found selective activity in the fusiform gyrus (FG) and orbital gyrus in the expert group, suggesting an enhanced perception–action coupling in baseball players that differentiates them from matched controls. In sum, our results show that EEG correlates of decision formation can be used to identify neural markers of high-performance athletes.

… the implementation of analytics still varies widely. Sports clubs and organizations vary widely in both usage of, and enthusiasm toward, analytics (Alamar, 2013). As per the current snapshot, the industry’s acceptance of analytics techniques is not ubiquitous. For example, in National Hockey League (NHL) the percentage of teams employing analytics professional consultants is only 23% while it is 97% for Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Consumer behavior, product markets, and financial planning will become potential subjects of mainstream advanced statistical evaluation in the future.

… in 2006, tennis instituted an automated line-calling system called Hawk-Eye, which has opened a door to digital tennis analytics. Hawk-Eye data is available to broadcasters to illustrate plays during the match, and it will be increasingly available to players for on-court coaching in the women’s tour. But while the data is not open to the public, the master cartographer and tennis data visualizer Damien Saunder didn’t let that stop him.

Damien Saunder

Saunder, who works at the mapping software company ESRI, is an accomplished map maker, leading projects like the world’s largest atlas, Earth: Platinum Edition. Trying to follow professional tennis as a boy in Australia, he says the time difference limited him to short newspaper summaries. He longed for a better way to understand how the match went, and why the victor won. Years later, it turns out that cartography and GIS are one of the ways to do that, especially with the help of on-court tracking data. Now running a consultancy to advise players and coaches, Saunder is producing a body of striking visual tennis analyses that are part of a new effort to mine a rich lode of sports data.

… One of the critical challenges for both manufacturers and programmers is making this data meaningful enough to keep users engaged and working on their fitness in the long term.

For a deeper look at how developers can use this raw data to carve out something unique and compelling, we spoke to three people at the forefront of the wearable app revolution.