Last month, Google announced the creation of Calico, a company aimed at taking on aging and defying death. Google is clearly no longer just a search engine, and its latest endeavor could have some major ramifications on athletics and sports medicine.
Calico, short for the California Life Company, will research people and other subjects that are aging in an effort to identify a way to fight it. An independent company from Google, rather than a subsidiary branch, Calico will most likely research diseases associated with aging and body deterioration such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease.
How will Calico seek to do this? No one really knows, as Google has kept plans close to the vest for the new company. This lack of information has led people to speculate that Google will take a Big Data approach to solving illness. Since Google is such an intricate part of people’s daily lives, the company has an enormous amount of data on all of us.
If you have ever searched for something on WebMd, for example, Google knows about it. Figuring out a way to put all that information to work to find common links between aging and certain diseases could be one way Calico goes about it.
So how does all of this relate to sports? It’s pretty clear – any type of anti-aging breakthrough could undoubtedly be applied to athlete injury prevention and recovery. Think about it – athletes put an enormous amount of pressure on their bodies.
Athletes who play professionally at a high level for numbers of years often have adverse health effects in the long term resulting from this constant physical exertion. Calico, hypothetically, could come up with systems or metrics that are able to track recovery or muscle deterioration, helping athletes to optimize and maximize their training.
Calico’s main problem in breaking into the sports market could be existing and emerging competition. Catapult Sports, an australian-based sports science company, already has contracts with multiple professional and collegiate sports teams in the United States.
Catapult’s technology also utilizes Big Data, though in a different way than many speculate Google and Calico will.
The company manufactures a match-book sized GPS tracking device that is placed on an athlete’s jersey to track acceleration, agility, force, etc. Teams are now starting to use this technology to help improve injury recovery and optimize athlete performance.
Teams and organizations can set optimal benchmarks when the athletes are healthy and then monitor progress across the different data points as an athlete recovers. So, Catapult has essentially been attempting to quantify athlete recovery.
And, it is working. At least six NFL teams have signed on with the company, and more are sure to follow. The New York Knicks have been using the technology for quite a while, and it helped veteran point guard Jason Kidd come back from injury last season earlier than expected.
Below is an example of some of the data points created by Catapult’s software:
It is technology like Catapult and Calico that is the future of sports medicine. Monitoring athlete performance at peak levels and monitoring it through recovery seems like the next wave of sports medicine technology. It will be interesting moving forward to see if Calico takes a sports focus or Catapult continues to expand its technology and corner the market.