Why do most sports injuries among professional athletes happen? "The majority of these big superstars think it's down to pure bad luck," says Stephen Smith, CEO of Kitman Labs. "We're here to say that it's not."
Smith is not from a tech background; he worked in pro sports as a rehab coach, but he realised that there was a significant role for data to play in preventing injuries, so set up Kitman Labs. "We can see that applying decent, strong analytics and science to what we do everyday is the route forward," he says, speaking on stage at Pioneers Festival in Vienna. "The cost of injuries in professional sport in enormous," Smith tells the audience, reeling off a list of staggering figures. Knee injuries alone cost the NBA $358 million dollars last year and the overall cost of injuries in Major League Baseball in 2014 was $1.4 billion. One trend he did notice when comparing different teams was that across all these sports are that there huge differences between the teams losing the most money and the teams losing the least, which suggested that it wasn't just a matter of luck.
To do the maths Kitman Labs realised it needed the data about injuries, which was difficult because no teams were actually collecting the information at the time. The company realised, "if we can capture that information we can actually make causative change," says Smith.
The other thing it needed were biometric readings, which were being collected, but were being stored in silos by the companies collecting the various datasets, which meant that none of the data could be used to inform the rest. It was this that made the company see it needed to create a centralised data platform, which is what it has now done, and which it trades off. "Essentially we've built the operating systems for sports," says Smith.
With the system built, however, there were other issues to deal with. "The more data that we collect, the bigger problem it becomes. How does that all affect the incidence of injury for them?" says Smith. "When we pull data sources together, the big question is how do we create value out of all of that?"
"In the early days of our company, we were probably very reactive," he says. What he saw was that when the company provided teams with information, they didn't know what to do with it, so he tackled that. It was not good enough to provide a level of analytics that required the coach to sit down for ten minutes and read through data to see if someone is capable of playing. Instead, Kitman Labs had to work on "collecting and displaying it in different ways to utilise it".
They made it possible for a coach to pull their phone out of their pocket to see which athletes were at risk. The idea was to create a simple and clean interface that would avoid turning coaches into analysts so they could spend the maximum amount of time with the athletes. "All of this information together is designed to try and empower decision making," says Smith. "The idea is that our software does the job and gets out of the way so that the coaches can do theirs."
A three-year trial has shown that Kitman's athlete management system can reduce injuries by 30 percent using known injury indicators. The company has done two validations, one with the San Francisco giants and another with the LA Dodgers, and it has found that it has good accuracy, and higher viability and lower liability than standard practitioners. Price varies from club to club, but depends ultimately on the size of the team, says Smith.