In conducting extensive trials with college and high school sports teams, Prevent Biometrics found value in syncing the impact data gleaned from its smart mouthguards with game video to provide context on collisions.
The process, however, was labor intensive, so the Prevent team approached Catapult Sports to inquire about using its XOS Digital and Vision video products. Conversations progressed to a more holistic approach: Prevent’s mouthguards would work in tandem not only with the video, but also with Catapult’s wearables.
“If you can integrate and marry the performance data with the safety data, you have potentially the most powerful full view of an athlete,” said Prevent Biometrics CMO David Sigel.
The pilot program began during the University of Colorado’s spring football practices and will extend to a handful of other teams in contact sports such as American football, Australian rules football, and rugby. Criteria for inclusion is that pro teams and universities have the ability for their players to wear the devices in competition as well as in practice. Catapult and Prevent will reconcile the data collected from each source and use video to investigate to the how and why.
Prevent Biometrics, a spinoff from the Cleveland Clinic, has been testing its mouthguards in football, hockey, lacrosse, rugby, boxing, and mixed martial arts, including with multiple Division I teams in Power Five conferences. The Minnesota-based startup is preparing for a commercial launch in time for this fall’s American football season. Catapult, meanwhile, is an industry leader in its own sector, but has been looking to innovate with new products and partners to become a full technology performance stack.
“To be able to incorporate head safety into the overall player wellbeing conversation in the context of what’s happening, I think that’s probably the biggest advantage we bring to teams,” said Albert Tsai, Catapult SVP of global elite products. “We’ve got a history of working with teams and making science and technology practical, understandable.”
Prevent deployed its mouthguards at the start of Colorado’s spring football practice term. Although Catapult joined midway through, the Buffaloes already used XOS Digital video and Catapult wearables, so the team is retroactively assessing that data.
“Right now what we’re doing is going back, taking the hit data and reconciling it against the wearable data to understand, almost as a post-spring training review, under what situations, which players, which periods, which drills created the most impacts,” Tsai said. “And then we’re using that to guide decisions in terms of coming up in the fall how they may or may not want to restructure practice.”
The Catapult and Prevent teams were both on site in Boulder for one practice, and Tsai said the potential of the joint data set was evident. At times, a player might register a head impact from his mouthguard at an unexpected time, such as while hitting a tackling sled. The video and player’s GPS wearable can provide additional information on how he was moving at the time.
“The mere fact that it’s registering in a drill where the head shouldn’t be impacting the sled in that manner, that points to a technical flaw that could be improved with coaching,” Tsai said. “It’s nuggets like that, that excite us the most in terms of, do we see patterns and players and drills. We tie in performance, and it stands to reason that people fatigue—player load is high—maybe technique starts to slip, your lower body starts to tire, and now your head drops in a way it wasn’t designed to. What does that mean in terms of how we coach?”
The teams participating in the trial are collecting data toward making those determinations. The benefit is the opportunity “to be proactive around head brain health,” said Miguel Rueda, Colorado’s associate athletic director and head of sports performance, in a statement.
Both technology executives cautioned against drawing too many conclusions too early in the process, but Sigel said the sports tech world is clearly moving toward the idea of the “connected athlete.” Competitors in all sports could be wearing three or four sensors generating data on three or four platforms. Integrating all of that will be essential.
“You’re going to want to consolidate it not only from a workflow standpoint,” Sigel said, “but [the data] is going to become much richer when you have the broader context.”