What 2023 brings to technology applied to Sports Medicine
2022 was a challenging year for the world’s technology industry. The Chinese government’s measures put a stranglehold on giants such as Alibaba and companies such as Amazon, Apple and Meta lost billions of dollars in the stock market, and thousands of layoffs took place. Added to this is the tension between the United States and China over chip manufacturing.
All in all, a complicated year. But what we know for sure is that the technology industry is one of the most resilient, innovative and creative industries to solve problems in different fields… Like sports medicine.
That’s why at VALITICA we want to start this 2023 by taking stock of the technological trends that, applied to our business, will mark this year.
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
Years ago this term was coined to refer, according to the Spanish consulting firm atSistemas, to the incorporation of different technologies such as AI, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), virtual assistants, robotic automation of processes, among others, to address current medical challenges.
According to the consulting firm, we will reach 2023 with great synergies between technology and medicine, making the most of data to achieve more predictive and preventive medicine:
“We need to integrate and process the huge amounts of data that these devices generate and enrich it with other data sources. With the use of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data algorithms, healthcare professionals will be able to make faster and more accurate diagnoses and even predict situations before they happen, making proactive healthcare possible,” states the atSistemas report.
On the other hand, every year the consulting firm Gartner publishes the technological trends that will start to gain traction during the next 365 days and that will continue to develop over the next few years. From there we chose the ones that most influence the prevention of injuries in athletes and we present them below.
If you want to download the full Gartner 2023 report, click here.
Industrial cloud platforms
Starting this year, companies will begin to have more independence to customize their cloud storage solutions. They will no longer have to conform to the features (storage capacity, number of users, etc.) that come by default in tools such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.
Something of great value for the world of technology applied to sport because to process the thousands of data that we use in statistical analysis of injury risk, we need a robust storage platform, which gives us a lot of capacity without losing speed.
Gaining wireless value
In the coming months, companies across multiple industries will be implementing even more wireless devices connected to their processes: Gartner identifies everything from chips in product labels to track deliveries, to sensors in forklifts to measure the risk of accidents.
At VALITICA, we have already taken an important step in this direction with wearable devices that allow us to capture biometric information that is essential for our statistical analysis of injury risk.
Adaptive Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI has been increasingly integrated into industry and even into life itself; we still haven’t gotten over the surprise we got in 2022 with GPT chat and the real works of art made with Stable Diffusion.
Without going that far, AI is key to our field of sports medicine because it is a technology that allows us to work with thousands of data simultaneously, thus achieving a much more complete picture of the athlete and, therefore, greater accuracy in predicting their risk of injury.
What is innovative for this year is that AI will migrate towards what Gartner calls “Adaptive AI”: by means of learning strategies, these intelligences will become much more efficient and precise. Hence the importance of Machine Learning as a technology capable of making AI constantly learn and evolve to its full potential.
Juan Merodio, digital marketing and technology expert, puts it in these words in the video: “in the end, artificial intelligence (as its name suggests) is intelligence and requires constant learning. Therefore, companies are adapting new learning models, machine learning so that their intelligences are able to learn faster with better data, requiring less data to make better decisions”.
Click here if you want to learn how we apply Machine Learning to Sport Medicine.
Bonus
If you’re a geek of technology applied to sports, you’ll love these inventions that are currently trending:
- Alter G: A treadmill that manipulates the effects of gravity, this causes the person’s weight to be significantly reduced while running or walking on the treadmill. It is perfect for patients rehabilitating cervical or knee injuries. More information here.
- Virtual Physical Therapy and Immersive Rehab: They use virtual reality in physical and neural therapy sessions for the recovery of patients who need to recover the mobility and functionality of different parts of their body. Learn more here and here.
