Advancing Sports Technology with the Seattle Seahawks

Working with data for professional athlete injury avoidance

Data science in sports has evolved and accelerated over the last several years, helping teams make better decisions regarding athletes and strategy (post & pre game, scouting, recruitment & acquisitions). The adoption and evolution of new applied technologies is slowly replacing notational analysis and allowing for improved insights into large data sets with specific actions to affect performance, create high performance environments and optimize applied Sports Science approaches.

Akvelon has seen the potential of sports technology, thanks to our participation in projects with professional sports teams and sports application development around the world. This exciting advancement was recently shown at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit. The Seattle Seahawks, in collaboration with Akvelon, Microsoft and Advanced Machines LLC, presented some new technologies that aid in player injury prevention.

This process uses Facial Recognition to identify the players, specially designed hardware to capture specific core and strength measurements, Azure Services to analyze the data and Power BI to visualize insights from the data.

Dean Riddle of the Seattle Seahawks and the Sports Science team utilize the results of these measurements to adapt training sessions and load for particular players who could be at risk from potential injuries.

The collected data is visualized through the use of Power BI toolset for quick interpretations and  insights into the data gathered from the device. It’s incredibly valuable to help ensure the continued health of the athlete, aid in the training load decision making processes and feedback mechanism of the coaches.

Dean Riddle and Patrick Ward from the Seattle Seahawks’ Sports Science Team in conversation with Marc Reguera demonstrated the technology on Monday, June 12th. We look forward to working on further advancements in this exciting area of growth.