During Ron Dennis’ 37-years at the helm of F1’s McLaren Group, data-driven insights helped to make fatal accidents on the track increasingly rare. After retiring from motorsport in 2017, the ever-active Dennis was serving as governor of Wellington College when his attention was drawn to the issue of sports injury in young people. Concussion, broken bones and twisted ankles were an all too regular occurrence on the school’s athletics fields – but any relevant research tended to focus on adults in elite sport, rather than the millions of young people participating in sport on a daily basis.
This led Dennis to establish his new organisation, Podium Analytics, with the hope of creating similarly positive data-driven outcomes for sporting injuries among 11 to 18-year-olds. It launched at 10 Downing Street in September - endorsed by two government departments and a host of national sporting bodies.
The not-for-profit initiative is backed by CVC Capital Partners – part-owners of the Six Nations – and has been carefully constructed by some of the leading minds in sport, science and technology. They include chief technology officer Damian Smith, former head of IT at the England and Wales Cricket Board. Having had an admittedly “tenuous” hand in England’s success at the 2019 Cricket World Cup, Smith’s current focus is on “making generational change” to health outcomes in sport.
“If we’re going to enable people to have a positive, lifelong association with sport, then we have to make those changes at youth level,” said Smith. To do so, Podium has raised and committed £40m to the Podium Analytics Institute for Youth Sports Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford. Crucially, the institute will break the norm by focusing on safety for lifelong health rather than athletic performance.
But researchers need data, and data on youth sport injury is in short supply. “There’s no obligation to record injuries in sport. In fact, there are exceptions in health and safety law that exclude injuries caused by the ‘rough and tumble’ of competition from being reported,” explained Smith. “So, unless the goalposts have fallen on someone’s head, there’s a good chance that we won’t have the data.”
The vast amount of data collected at the elite level is incompatible with youth sport, which is played at a different intensity, and often at a higher frequency. Young people themselves are inherently different to fully mature athletes, both physically and psychologically. Smith explained: “We’re great at putting athletes back on the field via sports science, medicine and strength and conditioning coaches, but we can’t continue treating 11 to 18-year-olds as we would adults. The reality is that their lives are very different.”
As part of its research strategy, Podium is undertaking the world’s largest longitudinal study into youth sports injury over the next 10 years. “We need to gather lots of data, so that we can understand both the scale of the problem and where particular issues lie,” said Smith. Podium’s injury insight platform, which was piloted throughout the summer, is provided for free and designed to help teachers, coaches and sports medics log and monitor injury data. Contributors can also use the platform to access any research findings, interventions and protocols that have been informed by the wider study.
“At the heart of the platform is a data lake, within which we’re gathering a lot of data in various structured and unstructured formats,” explained Smith. Data sources include third-party apps, wearable tracking devices and purpose-built applications. He added: “The end goal is to create a large, immutable data lake full of injury data.” In a global first, researchers at the Oxford institute will have access to an anonymised version of the dataset, enabling them to “deploy the latest AI and modelling techniques to identify causes and potential preventative measures against injury.”
The platform is being put to use in a study with the Rugby Football Union, looking into the viability of tackling laws within the sport. “We’re combining instrumented mouthguard data, video data and app-based survey data,” said Smith. “Once we marry those up we’ll have a really rich picture.” This is the overarching aim of Podium Analytics: to work with national sporting bodies to implement research-backed improvements to sport. “It’s not a lobbying exercise, and we’re certainly not barging into RFU headquarters demanding changes to the game,” said Smith. “It’s more partnered than that, and the governing bodies are keen to understand how they can make use of Podium’s data collection and research capability to improve.”
Working in unchartered waters brings its own set of challenges, as Smith explained: “Nobody knows if it’s possible to collect data in the type of situations we’re working in.” Indeed, when Podium created an app for teachers to log injury during school sport sessions, it had to be gradually iterated before it became usable. “We’ve had to discard some data during the learning process after discovering that it wasn’t collected in the most efficient way.”
This data is incredibly sensitive. Not only is it children’s data, it’s also personal health data. Podium partners with an external organisation to protect anonymity. “Our partners help us to build ontologies around the data, ensuring it is never published in a way that could risk exposing identity,” said Smith. “This is academic-level ontological reasoning that just isn’t available in the marketplace – it’s impossible for us to employ these people directly.”
External partnering has allowed Podium to utilise the best talent on the market while retaining that much sought-after start-up agility. “We’re a philanthropically-funded registered charity, and the last thing we want to do is build a massive base of developers that need to be constantly fed,” said Smith. “You want the best people and hiring them as employees isn’t a sustainable model for us.”
It was this line of thinking that prompted Podium to sign up for Microsoft’s AI for social impact programme. The programme promises to give “purpose-driven ventures the holistic commercial, technical and social impact support they need to succeed.” Through the programme, Smith explained, Podium has been able to: “Skill-up our developers in AI cognitive services while working with Microsoft’s architects and machine-learning (ML) experts to incorporate ML into both our data analysis and our front-end applications.” ML techniques are helping Podium to rapidly analyse and log events within recorded video. AI is being used to capture and transcribe spoken survey responses within Podium’s front-end applications.
The foundations are set, and Podium aims to be present in over 200 schools by the end of the current academic year before rolling out nationwide. “Our unique approach will facilitate a broad, epidemiological, and completely unprecedented view of the youth sport injury landscape,” explained Podium’s CEO Andy Hunt. “By bringing our stakeholders onto the same page, we can create truly unparalleled research and meaningful interventions.”
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