Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson is one of the brightest talents in college football. He has an incomparably strong arm and a certain poise in the pocket that makes him seem twice his age.
Unfortunately, the rising sophomore’s college career involves only three full games. Following a fluke of a broken finger that left him out for three games, Watson returned to the field against Georgia Tech and suffered an LCL sprain in that very game. What left him out for the rest of the season was a pre-existing ACL injury that doctors caught after an MRI on his knee.
This sort of scenario would make the people over at Kitman Labs cringe. Not only because this is a nightmare situation for any athlete, but they develop the exact software that could prevent this oversight.
“We need to be trying to continue to keep athletes at the very highest level of the game, performing well and feeling healthy,” said founder and CEO of Kitman Labs Stephen Smith of his company’s mission. “We want less people retiring through injury. We want to elongate the duration of athletes’ careers.”
Founded in 2012, Kitman Labs developed their initial injury risk prevention software, Profile Analyser, in Dublin. They eventually gained a following with a number of rugby and soccer teams over in England and Ireland.
Using some of the $4 million they gathered in July of 2014 with a round of Series A funding, the company looked to expand to American shores, setting up an office in Menlo Park, CA.
Their first American partnership came with the high-profile customer of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and they are looking to announce a deal with their first NFL team in the coming weeks.
All of this expansion also came with the further development of their software.
In the past, Kitman Labs was solely dedicated to the analyzing of whatever data came their way. This started with results from manual tests, then moved to GPS wearables and hi-definition cameras. They would take this information and determine what areas of the body certain athletes are at risk for injury—and they still do that. But their latest tool, Capture, actually helps teams to acquire that biometric data in the easiest way possible.
“We’ve actually developed a proprietary software that allows us to screen an athlete with no markers, no set up time and no set up costs, which means an athlete can just walk in front of the camera, move in pre-planned movement patterns … and in real-time spit back out a risk analysis on how those athletes are actually moving,” Smith said.
This means that athletes sports science staffs can have injury risk analyses in a matter of minutes, taking out the drudgery and time-cost of medicals and other systems. So, teams can look at players week to week, discovering if they have developed any issues that could turn into a serious issue later in the season.
“The fact that the players like doing it is a huge differentiator,” said Rich Maiers, VP of Sales and Business Development.
Citing a number of other companies in this market, like DorsaVi, who makes a movement sensor technology, Maiers and Smith noted Capture’s ability to test more frequently with similar, if not better, results.
But, at the end of the day, Kitman Labs still prides itself on their analytics software—a system that is ever growing due to its self-learning model. The more teams that partner with Kitman Labs means the more overall injury data that they have amassed. So, they can slight their program to one area or another, or manage the way that they look at different sports. That is not to disregard the years of research that their sports scientists have amassed and included in the program.
Over at Kitman Labs, the future is bright. They possess advanced technology to lend a helping hand to any athletic training department.
For all of their clients, though, the future may even be brighter.