Sports tech trains athletes to avoid overuse injuries

Musculoskeletal injuries in professional sports can cost a small fortune. For an NBA player who earns on average $5 million a year, his team loses $60,000 for every game the player misses.

Among amateur athletes, some 3.5 million kids in the United States alone are injured every year playing sports, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The most common kinds of musculoskeletal issues are overuse injuries. That’s where an individual does the same action repetitively, whether it’s shooting a basketball or sprinting toward the goal line.

“It creates a sort of micro-trauma on the body,” explains Ram Shalev, CEO of Physimax.

Since 2013, this Israeli startup has been using video capture and artificial intelligence to assess athletes’ physical abilities and endurance in real time. Israel’s Start-Up Nation cycling team is considering testing the system ahead of its participation in this June’s Tour de France.

Identify risk factors, improve abilities

Here’s how Physimax works: Standing in front of a smartphone or tablet camera connected to a laptop running Physimax’s software, the player does a series of actions such as squats and jumps. The technology measures movement and musculoskeletal function to identify risk factors and improve athletic abilities.

Artificial intelligence enables Physimax to compare the captured visuals with data stored in the cloud. That can help pinpoint considerations such as lack of balance or symmetry, weakness or limitations in range of motion, muscle problems and areas with the most potential for injury.

Physimax’s video evaluations comprise “roughly eight sections,” Shalev tells ISRAEL21c, including carrying weight in certain positions, making quick changes and jumping. The participant’s agility and strength are then compared “to normative values.”

The process takes less than 10 minutes.

https://youtu.be/KdoE1XtpsGA
Customized workouts and follow-up

Physimax testing is not a one-time thing. The system also recommends customized video workouts that can be run from the player’s smartphone.

These are followed up every few weeks – weekly, in professional sports — to compare improvement with a baseline.

Most sports teams don’t have the resources to train every individual privately, so the Physimax system groups players according to categories.

“A basketball player won’t get the same exercise sets as one would receive in a rehab facility,” Shalev says.

Among its pro sports customers, Physimax counts the Kansas City Chiefs in the National Football League, the Colorado Rockies baseball club, the Indiana Pacers basketball team and soccer teams PSG (France) and Flamengo (Brazil).

Division 1 college teams using Physimax include Princeton, Rutgers, the University of North Carolina and the University of Maryland (for which Shalev points out there have been no non-contact knee or ankle injuries since the university started using the system).

Physimax also works with healthcare providers such as Children’s Health Andrews Institute for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in Plano, Texas, and UCHealth Steadman-Hawkins Clinic in Denver, Colorado.
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