Cutting-edge technology is revealing how athletes' bodies work - and will transform sports forever
On the hardware side, Kitman uses a modified Xbox Kinect to scan athletes.
Specialized software calculates what's going on in places where the camera isn't facing.
The system can track deviations in motion that are imperceptible to the naked eye.
Other specialized labs like Vicon also do this work, using state of the art cameras. But that requires a visit to the lab. A smaller system like Kitman's can be used on a regular basis, as opposed to once or twice a season.
If the system finds that in the last moment before a jump an athlete is leaning much harder on one leg than another, it's a sign an injury could be coming.
"That lets us know there’s weakness in glutes or hamstrings, which is huge in knowing what to do with an athlete," Smith says.
That's what the deviation in the chart (below, at left) illustrates.
On the software side, Kitman can track how much work an athlete has put in over a season.
In this chart, you can see that a few players on this team already exceeded their seasonal averages (the black line).
Smith, a former rugby coach, says tracking over a season is important. A snapshot of a player's biomechanics at the beginning of a season doesn't tell you what's happening after they've been pushing hard and getting hit.
Tracking an individual player's workload can show if they are pushing too hard — or doing less than they normally do.
That's important because some people need more training to reach their peak, while others need less work and are more susceptible to injury.
Smith says that with teams they've worked with so far, their system has helped reduce injuries by 30%.
He says that the biggest advantage is that the software helps get usable information from all the data that pro teams are collecting.
And while they work primarily with professionals now, Smith expects that "as this area of tech gets democratized, eventually we'll see these same analytics in high schools" and for everyone.
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