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- IMeasureU is a company working with a host of top leagues and athletes to measure fitness and performance levels
- COVID-19 has seen more and more athletes rely on technology to measure their fitness
Every major professional sport (apart from darts and fishing) was cancelled immediately due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a previous post, Business Of Sport looked at how technology impacted the everyday fan (read that post here). But with sports slowly starting to restart again, how, conversely, have sports stars stayed fit through the COVID-19 outbreak?
As much as technology has been relied on by the world to overcome COVID-19, so have sports stars relied on it to stay fit. IMeasureU is at the forefront of this technological trend in the sports industry.
IMeasureU Helps Keep Athletes Fit
In an interview with Business Of Sport, I spoke to Dan Savin, Sports Scientist at IMeasureU, on how high-performance sports stars are using its technology to stay fit.
Founded in 2013 in Auckland, New Zealand, IMeasureU (IMU) is a technology company that specializes in the development of wearable sensor and software solutions for sports stars. This sensor measures manages, and maximizes human movement and has developed a lower limb load monitoring solution, called IMU Step, to remove the guesswork from an injured athlete’s return-to-play journey.
In 2017, IMeasureU was acquired by Vicon Motion Systems to accelerate its Inertial
Measurement Unit (IMU) product offering, with the goal of helping researchers, coaches and elite athletes to benefit from data-driven performance insights.
As Dan explains to me, his role is is “to offer unrivaled support for all athletes and
organizations that are using our technology at this time and ensure that they are getting the
most out of the insights we provide.”
The company works with professional teams across an array of sports including the AFL, NBA,
NFL, MLB, Rugby League and soccer teams.
The fitness industry has taken off from a consumer perspective (read more about that here), but so has the B2B product offering for sports organizations.
How Sports Stars Use Technology Like IMU
There are no two ways about it, what underpins IMU Step is seriously impressive and it is clear the company has built an impressive product.
“IMU Step provides specific lower limb insights to manage and monitor mechanical load in
running-based sports. Data is drawn from two inertial sensors, one placed on the lower
medial tibia of each leg.“
To use IMU Step, all an athlete requires is “two Blue Trident IMUs, straps or tape to attach the sensors to the lower medial tibia and an iOS device to start and stop their session recording.”
The sensors and straps are discrete, so once on, the athletes can even forget they are there.
The level of detail captured by IMU Step is extremely impressive.
Dan explained further: “The fitness program can be adjusted if necessary depending on the data. The intensity of ground contacts is sensitive to surface type, footwear, and fatigue, so this provides valuable information for the practitioner whilst the player is completing a program away from the club.”
The device collects this data, measuring accelerations of up to 200G, allowing sporting organizations to accurately quantify the impact of every step their athletes take. After each training session, some clubs ask their athletes to upload the data themselves.
“The data from each session is uploaded to the IMU Step dashboard for visualization, allowing our clients to better understand the mechanical intensity of a session or individual drill,” Dan continued. It can “compare the difference in load exposure between left and right leg and better understand how the load of a session has affected the underlying bone tissue.”
Critically these metrics can be compared over time and used to monitor progress – especially if an athlete is returning from injury.
“Technology such as IMU Step is a necessity to understand the external and internal demands
of training and match play. Without it, coaches would not be able to plan appropriately to
maximize adaptations to the training or match stimulus, or understand the exposure that
their athletes have received,” Dan continued.
How COVID-19 Made Athletes Rely On Tech For Fitness
“As the global pandemic was progressively worsening, coaches were having to
contemplate how they would best monitor the training of their athletes whilst in isolation.”
Dan outlined further: “We are fortunate that IMU Step is incredibly easy to use and understand, so players can use in isolation and upload their training data to the cloud-based dashboard for review by their coaches, wherever they are.
It is important for clubs that their players maintain a high level of fitness, so when they return to full training and competition, they can cope with the demands and do not get injured.”
What Could Be Future Technology For Athletes?
Dan tells me that “athlete monitoring is progressing all the time, with new technology continuously improving the quality and volume of data that can be obtained.”
Where could technology help athletes next?
“We are yet to truly understand mechanical loads on a local and tissue-specific level in the field. IMUs certainly open up this possibility, along with mathematical modeling and advanced machine learning.
To be able to ‘fully quantify’ an athlete in the ‘wild’, technologies need to be ‘invisible’ and seamlessly communicate with one another.
This could include some fairly far reaching innovations as Dan outlined.
“Embedded sensors within garments and marker-less motion capture are both possibilities, but it is vital that any data is accurate, reliable, repeatable and valid.
Yet for how deeply technology is being changing sports a key point remains in Dan’s opinion.
“Ultimately technology can only get you so far. Talking to your athlete and building strong relationships is vital to understand how they are feeling, so enhancing ‘soft skills’, gaining further understanding of psychology, and improving methods to collect subjective data are imperative also.”
