As sport technology advances, it will become less common to see it exclusively on the sidelines or on the practice field. Just recently Major League Baseball approved two wearable gadgets for use during games starting this season: the Motus Baseball Sleeve and the Zephyr Bioharness.
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The main reasoning behind this ruling was to hopefully aid in the detection of injuries in their early stages. The Motus Baseball Sleeve monitors elbow stress while the Zephyr Bioharness functions to provide heart and breathing rates.
This isn’t a next-gen way of cheating nor is there need to worry about these products providing any in-game advantages. All of the data collected can only be downloaded after the game by trainers and managers to help them diagnose a player’s outing, most likely the pitcher. Let’s not forget that this technology is furthering individuals that have a paycheck depending on their ability to remain healthy and stay on top of their game. Kudos to the MLB for beginning to embrace the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, pleasing the masses is hard to do according to an ESPN article that states there were some concerning negotiations over the use of technology by the Major League Baseball Players Association. Even veteran players, such as Brett Gardner, were joking about wearable devices possibly ushering in the use of phones on the field.
No other North American sports league is comfortable with the idea of its players utilizing technology during official games. The National Basketball Association recently came down on Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Matthew Dellavedova for wearing a startup device called Whoop. This wristband calculates an athlete’s recovery, strain, ambient temperature, skin conductivity, and motion. According to ESPN, Dellavedova had been wearing the device for fifteen games prior to his team’s March 31 matchup when it was officially banned by the league.
It’s understandable why the NBA or other leagues would be wary of the idea of allowing wearable technology. ESPN’s Tom Haberstroh made an interesting point about it in his April 6th column:
“Imagine Dellavedova’s wrist accidentally slamming into someone else’s face and the device crashing into an unprotected eye socket. Not good. And while the devices may be microscopic or embedded in the jerseys anyway, the issues go beyond the physical realm. Where do you draw the line for which devices are allowed? Would the league’s marketing partnerships govern which devices are OK’d? And who should own the data extracted from the wearables: the player, the teams or the league?”
All of these questions can, and likely will, be addressed as soon as 2017 when the next collective bargaining agreement talks get underway. Arguments supporting the use of wearable technology in games could be backed by the experimentation done in the NBA’s Developmental League. “Several D-League teams have had players wear various forms of it during games, including Catapult and its competitors,” mentioned Ken Berger of CBS Sports. The NBA may be close to accepting a new trend that will be hard to ignore as more discussions continue.
Wearable technology is the next chapter in how athletes and fitness-minded people keep track of their health. If the last decade or so is any indication, these devices won’t be going away any time soon. Juniper Research predicts that the revenue generated from the wearables industry will be around $53.2 billion in 2019. Leading the way will be the products from companies like Fitbit whose popularity has done nothing but skyrocket, selling 4.8 million devices between July and September of last year.
Major League Baseball’s acceptance of wearables during games should ultimately be an indication that wearables are coming to all leagues and it’s only a matter of time until players, teams and organizations become more comfortable with the idea of them not as distractions and privacy threats, but as tools to ultimately perform better and stay healthy.