One of elite sport’s most prolific technologies hails from the Finnish Lakeland and a pair of research studies into the autonomic nervous system and mathematical modeling of heart-rate variability at the University of Jyväskylä and that city’s Research Institute for Olympic Sports.
That work led to the creation of Firstbeat in 2002 and now, a decade and a half later, a tool used by more than 22,000 athletes from 800 professional teams, including everyone from Premier League leader Manchester City to defending champions such as the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins and University of Alabama football, not to mention athletes at the U.S. Olympic Training Center.
At the Consumer Electronics Show this week, Firstbeat unveiled an overhauled athlete monitoring platform, Player Status Analysis, which is powered by machine learning techniques to mine vast quantities of collected data and seek injury-prevention insights.
“Our current software is widely used on a daily basis to really track the training load and recovery of the individual sessions, but then when looking in a bigger picture, like the training history and long-term trends, then it’s very complex if you want to manage it well,” Firstbeat’s head of sports, Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki, told SportTechie from Finland. “We want to combine this crucial information together and interpret it so that it will serve a helpful tool for coaches so they really get the process data.”
This broader view of an athlete’s current status stems from culling data from a rolling seven-day window and comparing that with his or her past 30 days — one’s acute/chronic workload ratio (ACWR). Kurunmäki called the use of machine learning a “shortcut” to interpreting all of the data and cited the company’s move to a cloud platform in the last two years in improving Firstbeat’s diagnostics. Some research indicates that over-training accounts for 25 percent of injuries, a set that is largely avoidable by proper monitoring.
“Typically injuries are related to sudden increases in training load or if the load is too low,” he said. “Those are the scenarios that typically we try to identify from the data.”
Kurunmäki was a professional cross-country skier (he said he advanced to Finland’s national B team) who studied exercise physiology at the University of Jyväskylä before joining Firstbeat in 2005. He led the creation of the company’s professional sports division, which started with the national cross-country ski team and domestic hockey league. Magglingen, the Olympic training center in Switzerland, was the first international client, and the Firstbeat’s first foray into North America came at the 2008 NHL draft combine. That prompted the Buffalo Sabres to sign on, the first of what is now 16 NHL teams to use Firstbeat.
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Firstbeat also licenses its technology to other device manufacturers, including Garmin, Samsung, Jabra, Sony and Microsoft, but it provides direct service to its pro sports clients. Kurunmäki said Firstbeat began a trial of its Player Status Analysis with a handful of teams last fall, a number that will continue to grow in the coming months following further refinement of the product. (Firstbeat also works with dozens of clients in corporate wellness sector, where those lifestyle assessments indicated that Dec. 23 — just before holiday celebrations often begin on Christmas Eve — was the most stressful day of the year.)
The real power of the platform is in its personalization and guidance to each athlete and coach based on that user’s own data.
“If you measure absolute load from the training, that same number can mean different things to different individuals,” Kurunmäki said. “We really track what is typical for this individual.”