When USA Swimming high performance manager Russell Mark consults with national team swimmers on improving their times, he breaks down their races into smaller increments: splits at various distances and an accounting of every stroke. He does this work by hand, but a technology company he advises—Aspiricx, which is working in conjunction with Finis, a swimming product innovation company—is preparing to launch an artificial intelligence solution.
The Finis LaneVision powered by Aspiricx app uses computer vision and augmented reality to automate the collection of swimming data, including stroke rate and swimming speed. The company’s CEO, Kannan Dorairaj, has been using the technology to help his teenage son, Amit. Dorairaj showed Amit that there was a dip in his speed after one arm completed the stroke and before the other arm was engaged. “He saw it right away,” Dorairaj says. “Now as soon as one catch is finished, he’s getting into the other catch right away.”
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The technology, which records in 60 frames-per-second detail, enables a coach or parent to walk alongside the pool and capture this data by pacing from flag to flag and keeping the swimmer in the camera frame. (It’s currently designed for a private lesson or individual swim rather than a full race field.) Dorairaj says he expects to announce the release date for LaneVision at the American Swim Coaches Association World Clinic, held Sept. 3-8 in Dallas. It could be available in the Apple store by late September or soon thereafter. The iOS version will come first, but an Android companion is also in the works.
When Dorairaj first spoke to SportTechie in February 2018, he had hoped LaneVision would be ready for that summer, but the algorithms calculating distance and velocity measurements were amiss. “One year back, we were ready—but it was one yard off,” he says. His engineering team took another year to solve for what felt like the longest yard. Now the team is comfortable about the accuracy and is focused on improving the user experience through its current beta test. “Have we made it simple enough?” Finis CEO John Mix says of the lingering objective.
Simply swimming more and more won’t make you faster; refinement of starts, turns and everything in between needs to be considered. “That relationship is coming very clearly to them now,” Dorairaj says. “How do they technically improve something—the tempo, the stroke, the underwater velocity—to get a better number?”
The partnership between Aspiricx and Finis was brokered after a fortuitous referral. When Aspiricx sought a more efficient setup for motion capture and data collection, Dorairaj called Endless Pools to inquire about its compact units with a steady water current. Dorairaj, who lives about 30 miles east of San Francisco, was referred to swim at the Livermore office of Finis. Mix says he regularly makes his Endless Pool available to the local swimming community—anything to “advance the sport of swimming.”
Dorairaj and several of his team members, including Olympic legend Natalie Coughlin, visited Finis and had a productive session. (Coughlin is a longtime user of the Finis monofin and has known Mix for years; her husband, Ethan Hall, is Amit Dorairaj’s swim coach and also an Aspiricx employee.) That led to regular usage. Mix even arranged for Aspiricx to use a conference room as an office. In return, all he asked Dorairaj was, “If you really build something great, maybe we would at least be considered as a partner in business with you.”
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After nearly nine months of testing at Finis—primarily for Aspiricx’s subsequent product, StrokeVision, which will require a 3-D scan and coach technique based on body type—Dorairaj and Mix discussed a formal arrangement to use Finis’ brand recognition and global distribution network in promotion of LaneVision.
The app is likely to be made available through a monthly subscription. A user’s data is stored in the video itself, but race data can also be synced to the cloud for comparison of multiple races. (The video will not be uploaded to the cloud and will remain privately held on the smartphone or tablet.) LaneVision will also offer standard video editing and annotating features so coaches don’t need to toggle between platforms.
One of LaneVision’s other innovations is “what if” modeling concocted by deep learning to help swimmers understand race components. Dorairaj wants to instill the A-to-B cause-and-effect relationship. Simply swimming more and more won’t make you faster; refinement of starts, turns and everything in between needs to be considered.
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“Their mindset is slowly changing,” Dorairaj says. “I have to fix something. That relationship is coming very clearly to them now. How do they technically improve something—the tempo, the stroke, the underwater velocity—to get a better number?”
Dorairaj has experience working in several technical fields, spanning AI, IoT, data science and the solar industry. The aggregation of these skills helped him develop the core intellectual property of Aspiricx—its ability to account for light refraction (which distorts the image) through water.
The medium of water also negates data transmission. USA Swimming’s Mark has to wait until after a race to review underwater video. His tabulation of stroke counts is a laborious process too. But, if Finis and Aspiricx deliver as touted, the world of swimming recruitment and instruction could change.
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Mix notes that, if a young swimmer is tracked periodically, coaches would be able to monitor improvements and examine the details of races—perhaps an athlete is fast in the middle of the pool but has poor turns. That technique can be corrected, and analytics can inform club selection and college scholarship decisions.
“If we only based everything on the performance times of a race,” says Mix, “maybe we don’t know the whole story about that swimmer.”
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