Everything you missed until today about sports medicine in today’s context
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, once said that “from the dawn of civilization until 2003, 5 exabytes of information were created, but now that amount of information is created every 2 days”. Far from being an exaggeration, this calculation is a faithful portrait of the society in which we live: our world is saturated with data.
What to do in front of this ocean of information?
The answer lies in organization and interpretation. Whoever knows how to cross-reference, weave and create relationships between the billions of data generated every day will basically be one step ahead of the rest. It sounds like predicting the future, but no, it is making better decisions on a daily basis based on information.
This is what we do at Valítica: we use big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to empower the medical teams of soccer clubs with knowledge that allows them to predict the risk of injury, thus increasing the performance and well-being of players.
The fact is that proper injury management makes all the difference in high-performance soccer: according to data extracted from the clinical practice guidelines of the medical services team at Futbol Club Barcelona, the risk of injury in professional soccer is so high that it is as if a company with 25 workers were to lose 9 workers every month.
The key, then, is to provide medical teams with refined information that will be useful to them when designing, together with the entire technical staff, training sessions and planning competitions. Data such as the following (which we also present in our paper “Technology in sports medicine: present and future”).
- Not all sports injuries can be predicted, only those in which the internal forces of the body are involved, such as those produced in training sessions due to poor execution of an exercise.
- The lower extremities are the most commonly injured, with the thigh being the most affected anatomical area.
- Hamstring injuries are the most recurrent.
- The most common group of injuries is muscle/tendon injuries.
- Most recurrent injuries occur within 2 months of return to play.
- There is no difference in injury incidence between the top five European soccer leagues.
This knowledge becomes even more valuable when it becomes clear that the use of technologies such as AI is not as common in the world of sports medicine:
“Little is known in this field of artificial intelligence in medicine and so far they are not used in a usual way in hospital settings, but we are clear that it will be the medicine of the future and we have to know about these tools to develop our skills in a comprehensive way in precision medicine,” says Catalina Blanco, resident in the specialty of sports medicine.
How do we work at VALITICA?
We obtain all the data we need from GPS devices that record biometric information, both in training sessions and in competitions. Among the variables we analyze are:
- More than 11 workloads such as RPE effort perception scale, sprint speed, decelerations/accelerations, eccentric work with hamstring predominance, among others.
- Individual player information such as rest times/training times, previous injuries, among others.
- Evaluation of training loads using the ACWR model.
- Injury prediction using classifiers with RFECV.
- Prediction of false injuries (known in statistics as “false positives”).
- Classification of Foster’s variables.
- Among others.
Our goal in VALITICA is to put at the service of sports medicine proven, effective and innovative technologies that serve to increase the welfare of athletes. If you are part of the medical staff and you are interested in taking the next step, click here.
