Photo illustration by EMILY SCHERER / GETTY IMAGES
When NBA Commissioner Adam Silver spoke at the league’s opening ceremony Launchpad Technology Event During last month’s Las Vegas Summer League, his main focus was undeniably using the NBA’s burgeoning basketball-related tech space to improve player availability.
Silver’s comments were noted and he wasn’t just injured.
“Obviously, nothing is more frustrating than an injury, and nothing is more frustrating than having a series decided by a player who is not on the floor,” Silver said. “For the fans, frankly, nothing is more frustrating than having uninjured players after several programs scheduled for rest. That’s what we’re working on in the league.”
Multiple 2022 Launchpad finalists have created products in the world of health and recovery.Silver has next year’s program exclusively A focus on player availability with a focus on preventing soft tissue injuries and developing healthy habits in youth basketball. Silver’s message was clear through further comments that touched on everything from planned rest approaches and media rights deals to fans’ desire to see their favorite players on the court.
It was only fitting that Silver’s remarks came at Summer League. Became One of the league’s technology and innovation hubs. We spent a few days in Las Vegas at both the Launchpad event and the league’s annual Tech Expo, a booth event showcasing solutions from dozens of leaders in sports technology. The focus on player health stood out in one particular area. That’s the growing area of sensor technology sewn into fabric. Here’s what I’ve learned about an industry poised to make a big impact on the world of sports in the years to come.
For decades, load and force measurements have played an important role in injury diagnosis, recovery, and prevention. These measurements provide insight as to whether the athlete is fully recovered. A heavy sensor known as a force plate Track imbalances between muscles on either side of your body.
However, this approach has long been limited by its inconvenience. For teams and athletes traveling across the country during the season, carrying bulky Force his plates clearly presents a logistical hurdle.
That’s where Nextiles, a presenter at the 2022 Launchpad and Tech Expo event, comes in.
Nextiles CEO George Sun said: “In the world of semiconductors, there are a lot of hard, inflexible conductive pieces of metal. to attach them to the thread.”
Suddenly, teams and athletes everywhere have access to a multitude of tools to aid in health, recovery and injury prevention.
Nextiles coats fabric threads with these various materials and sews them into standard clothing, what Sun calls a conductive “highway” that retains a full range of motion and flexibility. create stuff It then relays real-time information to nearby CPUs.
One example is the portable, fabric-based force plate that Nextiles showed in Las Vegas. The surface placed under the athlete’s feet can be placed anywhere. It also easily tracks some impressive metrics like jump height and time in the air. Power, impulse, power of the jump. symmetry between the legs; forces applied during different stages of the jump;
As an added insight, athletes can wear one of Nextiles’ wearable fabrics. Nextiles utilizes their technology in both shooting sleeves and performance socks. Performance socks can track just about everything a portable force plate can track, plus much more, including:
- Certain forces affect certain parts of the foot, such as heels and toes.
- Gait Analysis (Pronation, Supernation, Planar)
- Ankle angle and roll analysis
- Foot orientation, position, and angle — both on the ground and during jumps
- Cut angle (used when athletes run and cut)
- Step count, walk run cadence, and other quick metrics
I tried on the Shooting Sleeve during a Tech Expo event and was blown away… normal felt. (It’s not clumsy or delicate, like you’d expect from high-tech gadgets.) The ability to use normal parts of an athlete’s wardrobe for performance insight could include Silver’s end goal of injury prevention. open the world
“[The data] It’s about potential injury prevention cues,” Sun said. [athletes] Landed correctly? Are their muscles in the fatigue zone because they can’t jump as high as they used to?”
Over the past year, Nextiles has worked primarily with NBA Academy Africa on the Launchpad program. I’m looking for a common injury indicator for athletes at this level. Are they getting enough rest? Are some players overworked? Will these fabrics help identify those cases more quickly? The goal is to work both above and below the scale, not only on a scale, but through various grassroots and youth basketball programs.
Beside the Nextiles booth at the 2022 Tech Expo was another cutting-edge application of fabric sensor technology. This is a collaboration between his two leading players in the sports wearables space.
Founded in 2016, STRIVE is a company with current affiliations with the NFL, MLS, and NCAA, focused on tracking muscle performance at source. In Vegas, STRIVE unveiled compression shorts that look and feel perfectly normal, but actually have electromyogram (EMG) sensors sewn into them, which capture the tiny electrical signals produced when your muscles move. measure.
STRIVE technology can collect important muscle amplitude data (such as the force your muscles exert) from multiple areas of your body, including your glutes, hamstrings, and quads. It also tracks ‘total muscle load’, a composite metric useful in areas such as general fatigue and recovery. For example, the athlete in this STRIVE-generated graph appears to have left/right hamstring imbalance. This is represented by the distribution of muscle load on both sides.
And that’s only half the equation for these special shorts: STRIVE’s partner is KINEXON, whose wearable tech has a presence in multiple European sports. WNBA and NBA(NBA Using KINEXON for contact tracing purposes For example, in the Orlando bubble. ) KINEXON has another set of sensors attached to the waistband of STRIVE’s compression shorts that track a unique set of “external load” metrics.
- Mechanical Load: An athlete’s overall workload based on distance traveled, speed (including speed change), etc.
- Acceleration Events: Certain instances of severe and sustained acceleration that can lead to greater physical strain.
KINEXON will lead the processing of both companies’ data within the same backend system. Together, these metrics reveal a lot about the current (and possibly future) state of a particular athlete’s body.
“[KINEXON is] Matt Howley, Applied Sports Scientist at STRIVE, said: “What we give you is the internal load, essentially the cost of achieving those results.
“What happened to this player and their speed and that sort of thing in a quarter or a part of the game? Acceleration and deceleration, [KINEXON is] Very good at capturing it. But we can say it objectively. price who do that? ”
The possibilities of the circle of health and recovery are immense. Teams can track how players are reacting to training plans and see proactive red flags that indicate a high chance of injury. Athletes themselves can use this technology for everything from enhancing their training programs to recovering from their own injuries. Load metrics help determine whether the healing muscle is in equilibrium with its healthy counterpart in the other leg.
KINEXON metrics can even capture game data with clever workarounds.
Wearable tracking technology is currently banned from NBA games, a major limitation for teams and athletes looking to analyze biometric data to improve performance. It is difficult to simulate his activity in a real game in other settings, especially with respect to muscle loads, exercise levels, etc. However, KINEXON has developed a method to extrapolate these numbers from the game, taking advantage of existing data from his League partner, Second Spectrum.
“[We] Raw location data generated from each game [Second Spectrum] camera technology, [and] Installed in Kinexon system. “So when our team wakes up in the morning, we can see his practice data, including all his KINEXON metrics. game The same is true for KINEXON metric data.
“It’s not apples to apples, it’s red apples to green apples,” people told us. increase [protocols]how do I get it to reach the required load level to be ready to go to the game?”
This kind of data adaptability is a big part of what makes KINEXON stand out in the world of sports technology. Having a system that can “talk to each other,” so to speak, is extremely valuable for teams and players looking for simple, integrated information.
“I think Kinexon certainly does a good job of being as open as possible,” said Tom Ryan, the NBA’s vice president of basketball strategy. That’s the name of the game.”
Not only that, but the use of Second Spectrum data together with insights from wearable tracking is an early step in bridging two worlds that have been “siled” together for the past few years: computer vision and wearable tracking data. is an attempt. put it. “The more you can have both, the more powerful you are,” Ryan said. For many in the sports technology field, this combination is a true holy grail. Even if restrictions on the use of wearables in games limit their possibilities today, entities like KINEXON have bigger plans for the future.
STRIVE and KINEXON are already providing these insights to a handful of NBA teams, according to multiple league sources. Soon, the concept will spread throughout professional sports and may even reach consumers. Within just a few years, ordinary people could buy their own compression shorts with sensors. The ability to closely track muscle activity, especially to gain more predictive information about when and why injuries may occur, is of value at all levels of sport.
“This is definitely the new frontier,” says Ryan.
If Silver and the NBA’s goal is for top players to wear suits as often as possible, sewn fabric technology could be the first of several solutions. Will it completely solve the long-term injury problem, or even stop teams from resting their star players? Certainly not, but a step in the right direction. So don’t be surprised if high-tech data-tracking clothing like the one showcased in Vegas this summer is quickly becoming commonplace on courts and fields near you.
