Last week myself and the team attended the annual MIT SLOAN Sports Analytics Conference, representing Fusion Sport as a major sponsor of the event. When you hear the word sponsor the usual spiel comes to mind – logos plastered everywhere and someone from the organization giving you a sales pitch. But we wanted to do things differently!
So many of our clients are doing great things in the world of human performance analytics; streamlining their processes to attain the competitive edge. We decided months ago that we wanted our clients to tell their stories for delegates to learn from. The conference started with the Competitive Advantage sessions, for which we invited the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) to share their journey implementing a nation-wide data management and analytics platform for injury prevention and performance optimization – a huge accomplishment when you are working with 38 sports, 17,000 users and 45 organisations globally. The AIS shared their AMS journey including the Institute’s world-first Apple Health Kit and Apple Watch integration. The Health Kit integration captures data from all of their athletes, providing support staff with data that tells the whole ‘life load’ story including activities outside of structured training, giving the Institute a complete picture of their athletes’ readiness.
Professional AFL team, the Geelong Cats, made the journey across the pacific to showcase some of the great work they’re doing utilizing the GPS integration with their training load dashboards.
Andrew Murray, Director of Performance and Sports Science from The University of Oregon, shared in a number of sessions presenting on how the University aggregate information and data streams from numerous technologies and other sources to make better informed decisions on athlete health, wellbeing and performance.
Fusion Sport also invited Dr. Adam Strang from the Air Force Research Lab, 711th Human Performance Wing to share on the implementation of their STRONG program and Human Weapon System dashboard.
We also had the pleasure of holding a hands-on workshop for delegates, allowing them to create D3 visualisations for coaching insights. D3 (Data-Driven Documents) is a JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. It makes use of the widely implemented SVG, HTML5, and CSS standards. In contrast to many other libraries, D3 allows for great control over the final visual result. Who would have thought there was such an appetite for this and the session was a sell out!
Dr. Markus Deutsch
CEO and Co-founder Fusion Sport