Aspire Ventures has sought to create the “iPhone of health care” with its Connexion kiosk, and it’s gaining early traction in the NBA.
The kiosk employs IoT sensors and a mobile app, combined with Aspire’s artificial intelligence platform, to provide daily baselines of an athlete’s vitals and movement to detect for any areas of weakness or overcompensation. While Aspire has spoken with franchises in the NHL and MLB as well as several Olympic committees, the most enthusiastic has emanated from the NBA, where about half of the teams have expressed interest. The Connexion kiosk is currently open for demonstrations at the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas after the prototype was debuted in to NBA teams and trainers at the NBA Combine in Chicago.
While the hope is to later develop the technology for a consumer-facing platform — such as uses for dermatological and mental-health screenings, vision and hearing tests and functional movement assessment at employers with large worker’s compensation liabilities — for now the focus is on catering to the market of professional athletes.
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Aspire Ventures’ chief products officer Mike Monteiro spoke with SportTechie about the Connexion platform:
On the “iPhone of health care”
Mike Monteiro: We don’t think that health care has a ubiquitous device that has lots of different sensor technology attached to it and has a platform where a bunch of different apps can be plugged into it to help keep people healthy and help them perform at peak. The original vision is around Connexion the kiosk as a true platform that a whole bunch of different apps can plug into it.
On an example use of the Connexion kiosk
MM: In particular, we’re focused right now on the first flagship app, which has to do with athletic performance. We partnered with Fusionetics — they have a system that is pretty widely adopted in the professional sports world, particularly the NBA, that has an athlete go through a functional movement assessment and they have a proprietary checklist of things to look for as they’re going through different motions, like a two-legged squat or one-legged squat.
Based on the different compensations that somebody might present — let’s say their arms move out as they squat or their arms fall forward as they squat — they have a system that can translate that into an understanding of what imbalances or weaknesses they have in their body and then, based on that, they build a personalized training program specifically designed to help you accommodate for those weaknesses and address those imbalances.
On future uses
MM: We’re going to have non-invasive biometric tracking, so things like heart rate, respiratory rate, O2 sat levels, even hydration levels and electrolyte levels in the body — we’ll be continuously tracking all of that stuff while you’re in the booth. That will produce this really interesting stream of biometric data which can help trainers figure out what’s going with their athletes. But, more broadly, there’s also a road map of additional apps that we’re going to use and incorporate with the different sensors we have in the booth. For example, a jump test or a reaction test or a power test — additional performance athletic tests and assessments.
On NBA teams’ expected use
MM: They’re thinking of it as a daily status check. Part of the routine is, you show up, you do a two-to-three minute assessment in the kiosk and get a baseline for where you are that day, like if you progressed or regressed from where you were yesterday. That sets a tone for what they’re going to focus on that day in training.
On the NBA’s focus on player rest
MM: I was just talking with the training staff with one team about that, and they said, ‘Yeah, it could certainly could be helpful for that.’ But there’s also a dynamic of, if you’ve lost three games in a row, it’s really hard to make the argument that the science is telling you to rest your top guy. It’s less about making prescriptive decisions about who should be rested, when and for how long and more to provide information to the coaches so they can make an informed risk-reward trade-off when they think about, ‘This is where this guy is, and this is where he’s trending. We can absolutely start him today, but here’s what we think the impact of that is going to be.’
On the vast quantity of data Connexion will create
MM: Every single NBA team I’ve spoken to has asked, ‘Hey, can you just ship us all the raw data so we can add it to our big old system where our data scientists are looking at it?’ Data interoperability is a big, big part of it.
On players’ and trainers’ reactions to trying out the kiosk
MM: Everybody has a big smile on their face. We intentionally designed it to feel high-end and guided and powered by an artificially intelligent guide of sorts. You step in, there’s ethereal music that lowers, the sensors are present and it does facial identification to figure out who you are, if you’ve been there before, and then guides you into the program and instructs you on how to go through it. Everyone’s reaction is, there’s this silly smile on their face as they go through it — this ‘wow’ factor that everybody gets.
There’s a separate reaction from trainers, who go, ‘Oh man, this is going to be so awesome. I don’t have to spend X time of my day doing all of these things by hand.’ That’s really the true business-value proposition for them. They can collect vastly more data that’s vastly more precise and objective and take way less time.