Player Activity Tracking App: Improving Athlete Performance with Machine Learning Powered Predictions
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Customer
Following its mission to Build Better Athletes, a global sports brand’s athlete division creates performance products that are revolutionizing the way players train to improve. The division provides athletes all the necessary facilities and expert guidance for improving their sports achievements. This kind of coaching is grounded on the results of the training assessments carried out by the company throughout the year.
Problem
The division has been employing a proprietary Performance Methodology based on the best practices, processes, programs, science and technology to assess the athletes’ progress.
With the results documented and processed manually, the training assessment took significant amount of time and effort. The customer realized an efficient software tool might help alleviate the burden of the tedious manual results capturing and processing. The app was to enable easy access to such digital artifacts stored for each athlete assessed as video records and data visualization.
Engaging Softeq
Given the project’s nature, besides the mobile application development expertise, the athlete division was looking to hire a development service provider proficient in algorithmic programming with strong skills in digital imaging / video processing.
Softeq’s Mobile Application Development team had proved its subject-matter expertise in a number of successful engagements with the sports brand. Softeq helped the company create several state-of-the-art mobile solutions that provide more compelling ways of connecting and engaging with the sports community. Moreover, extensive embedded system and hardware engineering experience made Softeq a perfect fit for the project implementation.
Softeq pulled together a team of skilled engineering professionals with strong roots in algorithmic programming, mobile app design and development.
Solution
Functional Capabilities
The team created a prototype of an iOS application for the athlete training evaluation. The solution supports the following stages of the assessment session workflow providing for a host of useful features:
- The assessment session launch. The athlete must go through all the test drills choosing an arbitrary number of trials.
- Video recording. An operator or a coach uses iPad Mini to record the athlete performing each drill.
- Marking the video. Once the recording is finished, the operator or the coach can add special indicators to the video. At the same time, the app performs a multi-parameter analysis of the results based on the athlete’s weight, age, and time taken to perform the drill or the distance covered.
- After the session completion, the videos can be batch-uploaded to the athlete’s Youtube account.
Distinctive Features
Some of the distinctive features of the app include:
- Radar Plot — displays the current physical state of the athlete, including their weak and strong points, as well as the achievement progress by mapping the previous and latest session results calculated in real time.
- Slowmo — shooting a video of a high-speed sports activity, which is then broken into frames for a slowmo playback, with the start and the end frame precisely timed and mapped.
- Frame-based image analysis — possibility to review and edit the videos taken during the session adding special marks and modifying the video length.
- Augmented Reality — possibility to use a mobile device to identify the distance to the start or finish mark.
The video is recorded at the rate of 60 fps, which is the maximum rate supported by the iPad Mini. The app then breaks down the video into individual frames.
Results
The application prototype, currently featuring four drills such as Shoulder Mobility, 40-yard Dash, Countermovement Jump, and Flash Push-ups, has been tested during the recent athlete trainings.
The athlete division is immensely satisfied with the prototype’s quality and usability. The team has exceeded the customer’s expectations by delivering the prototype within a shorter time frame but with a wider range of features than it was initially expected.
The customer sees a great potential in the app in facilitating the company’s transition from the old-school assessment techniques to more effective methods drawing on cutting edge technologies. The app is scheduled for development with an expanded functionality and features.
