September 12, 2023
In 2010, Netscape founder and prominent Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen predicted that software would “eat the world,” transforming industries like travel, transportation, retail, supply chain, ticketing, healthcare, and more in never-before-imagined ways. Ten-plus years later, that declaration has never been so relevant.
Software and a software-defined architecture are poised to change the world of movement health. And it could not come soon enough.
No one will argue about a shortage of Digital Health devices. Sports and healthcare organizations won’t say they need more metrics or wearables. They will, however, say they need more synthesis, fewer screens, and more accessible paths to truth.
University of Portland and Player Readiness
Organizations must intelligently collect, standardize, and catalog data for future exploration and insight. The value of data collection is in the analysis and its ability to answer questions. Without a well-defined data strategy that centralizes and standardizes data, analysts are left underpowered to detect trends, and the data organizations diligently collect is rendered useless.
In 2022, Sparta Science introduced its Movement Health Platform (MHP) to help organizations implement a data strategy to answer key operational questions.
The University of Portland Women's Soccer (WSOC) program is a great example of an organization leveraging the power of the MHP to answer questions about player readiness. In this case, the MHP brings together Hawkin Dynamics force plate data and Titan GPS/RPE data. The integration process is easy; the new Hawkin Dynamics API connector automatically pulls in countermovement jump assessments; Titan GPS and RPE data are uploaded via CSV. With the data centralized in a single location, WSOC staff has a full picture of each athlete and can decide about player load and readiness.
“By combining our different player datasets into one unified platform, we are becoming more efficient as a staff and positioned to drive informed decisions that directly impact the well-being and performance of our student-athletes," said Maite Zabala, Associate Head Soccer Coach at the University of Portland.
The fusion of these datasets is poised to empower the University of Portland to answer important questions about athlete fatigue, readiness, and return to play.
Value of APIs and Composable Enterprises
APIs promote modularity, interoperability, speed, innovation, and cost-efficiency in modern software development. Different systems can easily communicate with a “set it and forget it” method that allows real-time syncing. In the case of Movement Health, APIs allow specialized tools and applications to gain more value in an organization when integrated for a holistic picture of one’s Movement Health. This flexibility enables tailored experiences and functionalities to meet specific needs. Modern enterprise software design takes an API-first approach to enable what some call the composable enterprise.
“Composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks.”
-Kasey Panetta, Gartner
We can't tell you which solutions work best for your organization, but we can help you compose a better picture of Movement Health from disparate data sources. The MHP can support structured and unstructured file uploads. For example, injury data can be uploaded into the platform to help inform decisions about when to return to duty or plan. Sparta Science customers frequently want integration with commercial wearable devices like Oura, Whoop, Electronic Health Records, GPS/Accelerometer Devices, and Body Composition Devices.
Sleep, HRV, and Readiness
MHP is also used for research, including for Sparta Science’s partnership with the United States Air Force’s 24th Special Operations Wing (SOW), focusing on actionable insights from the Oura Ring on sleep and HRV to understand readiness better and enable the 24th SOW to make faster, more informed decisions for their teams. Oura data is integrated into the MHP via API. A fatigue survey is also integrated to gauge the fatigue levels of study participants.
UConn Basketball, Workouts, and Fatigue
We worked with UConn Women's Basketball to integrate Oura Sleep and Catapult GPS data. Combining these data sources allowed us to examine the relationship between athletes' performance during explosive movements and sleep patterns. Uncovering these trends provides a more holistic understanding of athletes. Better insights power better decision-making about things like training load.
Future-Proofing Data Collection
The MHP simplifies data collection, extraction, cleansing, and analysis to help organizations uncover insight. Unlike other systems that use form-style organization, the MHP Data Catalog understands layers of Movement Health data and tracks the relationships between raw sensor data, sampled data, and calculated metrics. When pressing questions arise, organizations have what they need at their fingertips—a well-organized schema for data that allows for easy export, deep analysis, and breakthroughs.