Physimax’s markerless motion-capture assessments are gaining traction in elite sports, including with the NBA’s Pacers and Jazz, MLB’s Rockies, the U.S. Tennis Association player development program, major college athletic programs such as Clemson and UNC, and Brazil’s most popular soccer club, Flamengo.
The equipment needed was already minimal—requiring only a 3D camera such as a Microsoft Kinect—but now could become near-universal. Physimax has adapted its algorithms to be compatible with the cameras on smartphones and tablets. The company, headquartered in Israel, said accuracy validation has been conducted in UNC’s Sports Medicine Research Laboratory. The adapted system is currently in field testing with a full release expected in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Dr. Timothy Noonan is an orthopedic surgeon who serves as the head team physician for the Rockies and a practitioner at the UCHealth Steadman Hawkins Clinic in Denver. While Noonan began using Physimax to screen professional ballplayers in spring training, he said the greatest potential for the technology is with public use. Steadman Hawkins replaced its motion capture system with Physimax after careful vetting.
“The pro athlete stuff is sexy and it’s cool and all that, but if we can take this technology to everyone and get it on a cellphone—just the potential you have to minimize low-back pain, frontal-knee pain, and some of these conditions, you can really make a huge societal impact, keep people healthier, and decrease health-care costs to the country,” Noonan said. “That’s the big goal with this technology. These things can change lives at a global level.”
Noonan said the most common complaint in his clinic is frontal knee pain, an ailment that can be addressed with physical therapy nine times out of 10. Musculoskeletal problems are one of the top costs on the U.S. health system. He said early screening with Physimax could “hopefully keep people out of my office and healthier at home.” Physimax’s first foray toward wider accessibility of its product was a partnership to make the system available to the entire Clemson population last year.
Noonan is part of a group of six pro sports physicians who are all shareholders or advisers for the company. That group includes Atlanta-based Dr. Spero Karas, who was the head team doctor for the NFL’s Falcons and is now an orthopedic consultant for both the Falcons and MLB’s Braves. Karas is also the director of Emory’s Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Fellowship Program where he hopes Physimax will enable fertile, longitudinal research opportunities with the university’s NCAA Division III athletes.
Karas is focused on alleviating what he calls the “injury burden” pro sports teams face. ACL tears and hamstring sprains often lead to the most competitive time lost. Hamstring injuries can be particularly fickle. Karas recently conducted research on soccer players using Physimax to gauge when an athlete was ready to return to play. Even when a player says he or she is ready for action, Physimax’s computer vision may be able to flag an issue.
“There may be subtle changes left in his motion that can actually give you hints that the kid’s not ready,” Karas said. He presented the work to the NFL Physicians Society in February.
Premature return to activity is also a major issue for athletes, and especially for amateur athletes who don’t have the luxury of a professional training staff monitoring rehab. After some early career research with an unwieldy marker-based system, Karas said he’s long wondered “How could you bring it to the masses or at least bring it to the athlete instead of bringing the athlete to it?”
“Most interestingly, the data would say that it’s not the initial injury that causes the most time lost,” he added. “We get a lot of those players back in two to three weeks, but if they come back early and they re-injure, their mean time to return is six weeks.”
Physimax’s can offer a full wellness program that includes bespoke training recommendations based on the data captured, and the ability to track progress over time.
“Generally, as an orthopedic surgeon, I’m a guy who puts broken things back together,” Karas said. “Repair ACLs and labrums and rotator cuffs and things like that—I’m a little bit of a mechanic. But for those of us in sports medicine, I try to be a little bit more holistic in my approach for injury prevention and return to play.”