Few sports require as many pivots, direction changes, and accelerations as tennis—a training workload the USTA is now tracking using an innovative orthotic made by Plantiga. The tennis governing body has begun outfitting some of its players with instrumented insoles that act like portable force plates in each athlete’s sneakers.
“One of the big things that we measure is the accumulation of impact force over a given session,” said Plantiga cofounder and CEO Quin Sandler. “Every time you hit the ground, you spike with force. If you hit the ground stiff and your frame is stiff because you’re tired, more force is created.”
The implications of this data are plentiful for guiding workout programs. The USTA’s general manager of player development, Martin Blackman, said the organization started supplying the devices back in the spring to objectively register each player’s acceleration, deceleration, and training load. At some point in the future, that information can be added to IBM Watson’s tennis analytics program to complement the Red Steps (or redirect steps) gleaned in matches via Hawk-Eye’s optical tracking system.
Plantiga recently launched its signature product, the Tiga-Edge platform, and the company is also working with the military and in active conversations with three NBA, two NFL, and two MLB teams.
The company was born from a father-son project. Sandler’s father, Norman McKay, conducted gait and movement research at the University of British Columbia. (The name “Plantiga” is born from the word “plantigrade,” which describes an upright mammal walking on the soles of its feet.) McKay understood the power of ground-reaction forces and the benefit of force plates in a biomechanics lab. The limitation was always the inability to collect similar data in the real world. Even the lab data could sometimes be clouded by the Hawthorne Effect—the tendency of participants to alter behavior because they know they are being observed.
Sandler was an entrepreneur with experience founding three prior startups, so the two combined their skills and worked on Plantiga initially as a “side hustle,” Sandler said. The Vancouver-based pair experimented with several technologies in various forms that built off research into functional asymmetry as a predictor of injury. More recently, Matt Jordan, a Ph.D. sport scientist who previously led the strength and conditioning team at the Canadian Sport Institute, has led Plantiga’s biomechanics research in this area.
“We knew that if we could build instrumented footwear, or an insole that would give us ground reaction force-equivalent data—so, basically building a force plate underneath each foot—that the applications of that, not just in sports but in health care and fall prevention of the elderly all the way to biometric security and identification of people by the way they walk and move, was going to be powerful for the world,” Sandler said.
McKay fell ill and died two years ago, but Sandler has continued the work they started. In July 2018, Plantiga closed a $2.1 million investment round led by by Vanedge Capital with support from the Business Development Bank of Canada and a few angel investors in Toronto and the Bay Area. They graduated from an accelerator at the University of Toronto called the Creative Destruction Lab. And the company gained some key sporting insight from the Los Angeles Lakers.
A friend of Sandler’s had done some work with Tim DiFrancesco, who was the Lakers strength coach for six seasons until May 2017, and brokered an introduction. Plantiga presented to the team, which led to DiFrancesco and team trainer Gary Vitti ultimately joining the team as advisers. They also brought on Paul Robbins, an experienced sports tech adviser who has worked with Kinexon, Kinduct, and STATS, to consult.
Plantiga’s proprietary hardware is manufactured and assembled in-house, end-to-end, but Sandler sees the company primarily as a data company—he uses the term “human movement intelligence.” Its Tiga-Edge orthotic serves primarily for the collection of metrics such as impact g-force, takeoff g-force, ground contact time, flight time, landing time, and takeoff time. When someone gets tired, their feet stay on the ground longer. Even 50 milliseconds is noticeable. Plantiga collects 833 data points per second.
“We’ve built a research-grade device,” Sandler said. “It’s like a medical data acquisition device, and we’ve built all of our insights and analysis on top of it.”
His team has worked with the University of Victoria, Emily Carr University of Art+Design, the Seattle Mariners, Simon Fraser University athletics, and the Canada’s National Research Council on testing and validating the data through various research and pilot programs.
A decade since he began working to help realize his father’s vision, Sandler has seen his product through to launch. He’s always wearing his own pair, even during a recent phone conversation with SportTechie.
“When I get tired, I definitely become symmetrical on my left side, which is counterintuitive. Because I’m right-leg dominant, as I get really tired, I start compensating on the other side.
“I can see it clear as day.”