Sports Wearables To Reduce Players’ Injuries

The most important purpose of the wearable technology for sports nowadays is to prevent injuries or to reduce any chances of them. This is why major sports organizations are partnering with different wearable manufacturing companies to work for the safety of their players.

Activity trackers, different sports wearables are all used for the analytical examination of the players’ wearing them. One of the major factors which are promoting the use off wearables for different analysis is an algorithm developed by WA and Victorian sports scientists and mathematicians.

As per the researchers, the data gathered from the gyroscope and accelerometer embedded in the wearables can be used to better understand the nature and different factors of the injuries caused to the athletes. The research was performed over the Catapult S4 wearable. The researchers and examiner used various examples to explain this situation.

Sports scientist from Victoria University Dr Robertson, who initiated the collaboration with Curtin and Deakin Universities, says:

“You look at a sport like rugby, forward type players are tackling and being tackled multiple times in a training session or a match. However it may not necessarily be the number of tackles that is doing the damage—it might be the intensity or magnitude of the tackle.”

“By using automated classification you take the burden off the practitioner being required to sit there and manually count the number of times a player runs, sprints or is tackled,” he says.

This means the information collected by the wearables in different games ensure the safety of the wearer in different ways. As for the Catapult devices used in the study, they are the state of the art in wearable athlete monitoring technology. The devices have been developed by Catapult Sports in collaboration with the Australian Institute of Sport during the past 8 years. These are the trackers which have been used many sports professionals and team players, worn under the jersey, for many years. The wearable weighs less than an ounce.

The different reports also include graphic tools including plotting player position, velocity, heart rate, effort lengths and recovery time. In the end, Dr Robertson also said that the research will lead to the better analysis of the sports wearable data gained from different technologies. The wearable are dissolving in the sports very fast and is high time we know the benefits they are providing and the threats they are overcoming.