New technology from startup ventures is transforming the sports industry. The mission of this series will be to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story. Feel free to contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for this series.
Company: Fatigue Science
CEO: Sean Kerklaan
Headquarters: Vancouver, BC
1. What is your elevator pitch?
We provide advanced sleep and fatigue analytics to elite sports teams to help them unlock the competitive advantage of sleep. We work with professional teams like the Vancouver Canucks, Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Mavericks to provide validated insights that help athletes recover faster and perform better.
2. Problem & Solution
The science shows us a surprisingly low level of fatigue impairs physical and cognitive performance. Studies have also shown that chronic sleep restriction increases injury risk, shortens playing careers, decreases testosterone levels, and reduces sprint times and shooting accuracy, among other harmful effects.
The good news is that sleep has a direct, measurable and highly predictable effect on human performance. With an understanding of sleep science and the right tools, sleep can be managed the way other building blocks of human performance are. Fatigue Science delivers scientifically-validated technology to measure this impact. We do this using data collected from a wrist-worn device, and passing the data through a biomathematical model which was developed by the US Military. Through this process, we can turn sleep data into performance data. The coaching staff is then empowered to work with individual players as needed. Staff can also quantify the impact that scheduling and travel have on the overall team’s performance.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
On the human performance side, we work with college and professional sports teams, and also the military. However, there is also a large adoption of the technology with organizations that employ operators in safety-sensitive jobs. These are jobs in the transportation, mining, and oil and gas industries, for example.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Our clients subscribe to our Team Platform to continually monitor sleep and understand its impact on individual athlete and overall team readiness. This subscription includes access to the wearable device that measures sleep, and to the cloud platform for team sleep analysis and management.
5. Management Team
http://www.fatiguescience.com/about/
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
We can quantify an athlete’s mental fatigue at any given moment. Historically, this data has been primarily used to look at team fatigue over the course of a season to influence scheduling decisions.
Soon, we’ll equip athletes with a personal mobile app that lets them visualize their fatigue score tomorrow and the next day. That’s a big deal, because never before have athletes been equipped with the tools to see how their sleep decisions tonight will directly impact their performance for tomorrow’s game.
This eliminates a lot of the abstraction around sleep, and we believe it will be a huge motivator for athletes to truly prioritize sleep as a readiness tool on par with the way they eat and train.