Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 23, 2017

… The team confirmed the initial fear about an ACL tear, but video of the incident indicates much more than that. … To date, Fant has a Cinderella story of being a basketball player who has progressed from recently learning the game to having been expected to dominate. Hopefully he can return to form, but it will be challenge to do so for the start of 2018.

… At the French Open, Kyrgios said he doesn’t like to practice on red clay back at home in Canberra because “it gets my car dirty.” He may wear his sensitivity on his clay-free sleeve, but he’s launched ugly controversies and confrontations.

Still, Kyrgios has the degree of talent that successfully extorts forgiveness from people who cherish the game and the kind of rare talent he possesses. Asking people to give him more time to mature, and to issue him a pass on numerous shortcomings is a humming cottage industry. Old-school Aussie stalwarts like Kyrgios’ Davis Cup captain Lleyton Hewitt and Rod Laver have refused to spurn him. At the worst of times, even they look like enablers who make too many concessions to Kyrgios’ incandescent talent — and overlook some of his cut-and-dried flaws.

STEVE KERR WAITED about a week before he texted Dan Quinn. He knew how many sympathy messages the Falcons coach must be getting — Kerr got about 50 after his Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the 2016 NBA Finals. The last thing a beaten man wants is people feeling sorry for him. Those first few days, Kerr found comfort in commiserating with fellow Warriors, who knew exactly what he was going through. Quinn did the same. While the Patriots celebrated deep into the night after their historic 25-point comeback victory in Super Bowl LI, the Falcons carried through with a planned party on three floors of the Westin hotel. Well, it wasn’t really a party; food and drinks were served, but everyone felt sick. Still, there was a need to be around the team, even while surrounded by family and friends, to process what had just happened.

… asked this week about whether the players he inherited cared as much as they ought to about the effects of relegation from the Premier League, he did not shirk it.

‘Seventy people have lost their jobs from this club in the last year or so,’ he said. ‘The players are responsible for that because of their performances.

‘A very large percentage of the players here will care about that. But yeah, there will be a percentage who aren’t too bothered because they are still getting paid. And I don’t mean just at this club, I mean throughout football. This club is no different from that point of view.’

… Several months later, Ryun made the trip to Alamosa anyway. By then, he had lowered his mile best to 3:53.7. He was fit and ready. But [Jack] Daniels had been right about the altitude. “I ended up running the most painful 4:30 I have ever run,” Ryun says.

Before long, Ryun, Gerry Lindgren, George Young, Bob Schul and 22 other top American distance runners agreed to be tested by Daniels before the 1968 Olympic Track Trials. The results of that study showed them to be—guess what—extremely lean, fit, and fast. (Ryun ran a strong second in the Mexico City 1500 meters, but couldn’t match the altitude-born and trained Kip Keino, from Kenya.)

Almost a half-century later, Daniels’ research, coaching, frequent speaking engagements, and best-selling book, Daniels’ Running Formula, make him one of the best known and most highly regarded names in running.

… Jonathan and George started thinking: Maybe we can identify bacteria found in elite athletes — and give them to regular people as a nutritional supplement?

The first step was finding out which bacteria are especially common in elite athletes. [audio, 10:28]

At HD2i, one of our core missions is to engage in strategic partnerships with early stage health technology companies. Our bet is that the technologies that will power next-generation healthcare are more likely to come from these folks than from established players. We aim to pair the best aspects of entrepreneurship with the expertise and rigor of an academic medical center to accelerate progress. Our first realization of that vision is the Health Entrepreneur Partners Program, in which we identify and build the algorithmic and statistical tools that help entrepreneurs use data to drive their products forward.

In this post I’m going to describe preliminary work we’ve completed with Fit3D, the first participant in the partners program.

We propose DeepBreath, a deep learning model which automatically recognises people’s psychological stress level (mental overload) from their breathing patterns. Using a low cost thermal camera, we track a person’s breathing patterns as temperature changes around his/her nostril. The paper’s technical contribution is threefold. First of all, instead of creating hand-crafted features to capture aspects of the breathing patterns, we transform the uni-dimensional breathing signals into two dimensional respiration variability spectrogram (RVS) sequences. The spectrograms easily capture the complexity of the breathing dynamics. Second, a spatial pattern analysis based on a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is directly applied to the spectrogram sequences without the need of hand-crafting features. Finally, a data augmentation technique, inspired from solutions for over-fitting problems in deep learning, is applied to allow the CNN to learn with a small-scale dataset from short-term measurements (e.g., up to a few hours). The model is trained and tested with data collected from people exposed to two types of cognitive tasks (Stroop Colour Word Test, Mental Computation test) with sessions of different difficulty levels. Using normalised self-report as ground truth, the CNN reaches 84.59% accuracy in discriminating between two levels of stress and 56.52% in discriminating between three levels. In addition, the CNN outperformed powerful shallow learning methods based on a single layer neural network. Finally, the dataset of labelled thermal images will be open to the community.

… In an ever-expanding market, wearables manufactures will need to go beyond just displaying health metrics and look to provide much more meaningful analysis of our vitals data. Not just after, but also during exercise. Ideally in real time, so we can optimize our fitness data into action.

So which devices are leading the way in taking fitness tracking to the next level? Here are a few examples.

Long-term medical wearables are often limited by the adhesives that are used to stick them to the skin. The skin needs to breathe and glues can prevent that, remaining in the skin’s pores even after removal of a bandage or stick-on ECG electrode. The materials have to be biocompatible and non-irritating, as well as avoiding sensitizing the skin during prolonged use.

3M is now releasing a new product, the 4076 Extended Wear Medical Tape, that is designed for use with medical devices and suited for wear for up to two weeks. It’s meant to stick well even on sweaty individuals and to remain in place on moving parts of the body without having to be reapplied.

More than 60 years ago, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid—better known as DNA. Today, for the cost of a Netflix subscription, you can have your DNA sequenced to learn about your ancestry and proclivities. Yet, while it is an irrefutable fact that the transmission of DNA from parents to offspring is the biological basis for heredity, we still know relatively little about the specific genes that make us who we are.

That is changing rapidly through genome-wide association studies—GWAS, for short. These studies search for differences in people’s genetic makeup—their “genotypes”—that correlate with differences in their observable traits—their “phenotypes.” In a GWAS recently published in Nature Genetics, a team of scientists from around the world analyzed the DNA sequences of 78,308 people for correlations with general intelligence, as measured by IQ tests.

rtificial intelligence technologies are no longer limited to recognizing still, individual images as they can now also identify various activities in videos. Developing an automatic system for activity understanding is especially pertinent today, as video devices from dash-cams to cell phone cameras create far more footage than what humans alone are capable of analyzing.

Such a system creates opportunity for new applications while enhancing existing ones. For example, broadcasters will be able to accurately find high quality materials in a large trove of unidentified video databases, publishers will be able to present personalized videos to their viewers, and software will more accurately screen footage from security cameras.

The ActivityNet Challenge was created to encourage relevant developments in video understanding. At the challenge, AI algorithms are tasked with correctly recognizing activities in 10-second video clips with each clip containing a single human-focused activity – e.g., playing an instrument or shaking hands. For this task, participants used the Kinetics dataset, a new large-scale benchmark for trimmed action classification which has more than 200,000 training videos across 400 different actions.

Judging by recent hamstring injuries of high-profile athletes at the world track and field championships in London, some may muse that perhaps it’s a contagious virus hitting sprinters.

Andre De Grasse was aiming for a chance to dethrone Jamaica’s Usain Bolt as the fastest man in the world. But the day before the start of the 100 metre competition, the Canadian sprinter announced a hamstring tear had forced him to withdraw. Bolt had his own dramatic hamstring injury in what was likely his final race. During his leg of the 4×100-metre relay, the Olympic champion tumbled and had to exit the track via wheechair.

What is going on?

As the Director of the Running Injury Clinic at the University of Calgary, I can assure sports fans these injuries are definitely not contagious, but a risk factor for all elite athletes — especially sprinters.

Charter flights may be the most important bargaining point in MLS’ next collective bargaining agreement negotiations in 2020, and player health and ease of travel isn’t the reason. In fact, charter flights may be one of the big drivers of significant change in the league.

Any fan of MLS knows by now that the league, like the rest of us, remains stuck on commercial travel. As a beat reporter at the Orlando Sentinel in 2015, I often found myself coming back from a road game on the same flight as Orlando City. It was often awkward for the players and myself, though occasionally, it was a boost to be able to corner coaches for a few extra quotes. It never got normal, though, to see a player like Kaka board with the rest of us and hope to avoid a middle seat. And yes, sometimes even Kaka gets stuck with a middle seat.

There’s not one coach or player in MLS that doesn’t believe charter flights will make travel easier and decrease the current edge home teams have.

Leicester City’s incredible rise from Championship promotion hopefuls to Premier League champions and Champions League quarter finalists in a short space of time has left many pondering how it has been possible?

For a club of City’s stature to be able to compete not just with the biggest clubs in England but in Europe seems almost implausible.

A group of players plucked from lower leagues and from relative obscurity have come together to become a footballing force, and there have been many ingredients that have provided the recipe for success.

Ambitious owners, shrewd management and leadership and a strong unity have been fundamental, but at the very heart of the Leicester City story has been the club’s innovative recruitment policy.